Turn The Damn Calendar…

“Nothing was affirmative, the term ‘generosity of spirit,’ applied to nothing, was a cliche, was some kind of bad joke. Sex is mathematics. Individuality no longer an issue. What does intelligence signify? Define reason. Desire – meaningless. Intellect is not a cure. Justice is dead. Fear, recrimination, innocence, sympathy, guilt, waste, failure, grief, were things, emotions, that no one really felt anymore. Reflection is useless, the world is senseless. Evil is its only permanence. God is not alive. Love cannot be trusted. Surface, surface, surface was all that anyone found meaning in… this was civilization as I saw it, colossal and jagged…”
― Bret Easton Ellis, American Psycho

There is evil stalking the air, floating like a dirty whirlpool in the melancholy and murky landscape, in the by-lanes of a soul without emotions, ravaged or cushioned in a comfort zone, like a stagnant quagmire in the stasis of the subconscious, across the geography of dingy inner-lanes with open gutters and the stink of male urine, inside PVRs with full-power, violent, masculine, aggressive, con-nationalist film-flam propaganda, and in the glitzy, clinical, swanky shopping malls with young couples trying to look for a shadowy afternoon staircase.

This shadow stalks the compulsive, obsessive, repetitive ‘manufactured consent’ in the sold out stooge media, across the pillars of great expectations of justice amidst stark and persistent injustice.

So how many tens of thousands of voters are being deleted, and how many women will be given a pathetic sum of ₹10,000 to buy their souls and votes in a starkly poverty-stricken nation, days before this and that polls, violating all norms of electoral ethics?

Reports enewsroom.infrom Kolkata, “Although Election Commission rules clearly say that people above 85 years of age should be visited at home for voter verification, many elderly citizens are still being harassed. The most shocking reality is that people who have voted in this country for decades are now being forced to stand in queues and prove their existence with documents. Many argue that the problem has arisen because current records do not match the 2002 voter list. But no one asks the most important question: citizens did not create these errors. These mistakes were made by the Election Commission itself. So why should ordinary people bear the burden?…

“The fear of losing citizenship is clearly visible on people’s faces. Despite enormous difficulties, they are still trying to reach hearing centres. Some are hiring ambulances with their own money. Some are being brought on stretchers. Others are somehow managing to come.”

So why are elderly Indian citizens being forced to prove their citizenship yet again? But who will answer a legitimate question like this when all answers are ‘blowin’ in this evil wind’.

And then they pump their 56-inch chests – we are Vishwagurus! With their foreign policy in shambles, no clout whatsoever in the world, or in the neighbourhood where friends have turned foes, while protests against the genocide in Gaza are not allowed – and a gigantic economic and military world power like China breathes down our neck,

Oh! Our ‘Red Eyes’ seem so puffy and swollen!

So whatever happened to the terrorists who organised a massacre at Pahalgam, killing male tourists in a tourist hub, with local Kashmiri Muslims the only brave people who risked their lives to get them out of this murder zone with no security whatsoever? So, even while Pakistan wholeheartedly agreed, who stopped the short conflict, was it Donald Trump, as he claimed so many times, and how many of our best aircrafts were shot down by them?

The uncanny questions remain. And – the answers?

Vishwaguru?

As Aditya Nigam, astute social scientist, points out in a cryptic social media post: “Yes, with the rising tide of anti-Hindu and anti-India hate across the world, you sure will make it man! You are being called filthy and uncivilized by your own allies of the Christian White supremacist Right-wing across USA, UK, Europe, Australia and New Zealand. Actually, they never considered you their ally…

…And now with your vigilante goons on the prowl against Christians (nothing new but hugely intensified) – you are done. The Christian Right MAGA types in the USA are openly alleging that Hindu and RSS-linked foundations raise money in the USA in order to carry on attacks on Christians back home. Deal with it, Mr Bhagwat!”

ALSO READ: You Cannot Bomb The Truth, Bibi!

Undoubtedly, in this twilight zone, it is all smoggy. In this vicious smog which enters the lungs, the eyes and eyelashes, and the layers of the brain-dead brain, how do you distinguish between the Devil and God? In this majestic atmospherics of the diabolical, it all becomes stunningly blurred. The line of control in our life and times seems to have disappeared.

When a nation and its establishment starts enjoying its own moral decay and ethical downfall as a sign of eternal immortality and  absolute power, the abyss and the gaze become lovers, unrequited, obsessive, psychic, insatiable, devouring each other in abject despair.

Writes German philosopher, Friedrich Nietzsche, in Beyond Good and Evil, “He who fights with monsters must take care lest he thereby become a monster. And if you gaze for long into an abyss, the abyss gazes also into you.”

“If only it were all so simple! If only there were evil people somewhere insidiously committing evil deeds, and it were necessary only to separate them from the rest of us and destroy them. But the line dividing good and evil cuts through the heart of every human being. And who is willing to destroy a piece of his own heart?” This is great Russian novelist, Aleksandr Solzenitsyn, once exiled and condemned for eight years in Siberia’s hell-hole by Stalin, talking about the blurred lines in The Gulag Archipelago, an epic on Siberia.

Unnao’s Sengar given bail: a rapist, facilitator of gang rape of a minor, sentenced for the murder of the minor’s father in judicial custody, an infamous BJP leader, is symbolic of this entrenched evil stalking ‘New India’. So are the murderers of young Ankita Bhandari, reportedly from the same party.

Remember the garlands adorning those sentenced in the Bilkis Bano case – Gujarat genocide, 2002?

A sinister phenomenon of relentless injustice haunts the torturous process of justice in contemporary India. Ask young Umar Khalid, the defender of Indian Constitution and non-violence, now five years in prison, for making a speech where he quoted Mahatma Gandhi! Is he a terrorist, really? Like the other brilliant Muslim scholars rotting in our prisons?

So I care a damn for ‘Happy New Year’ or fake New Year resolutions, and the clichéd messages forwarded on WhatsApp every year. For me, it could be Stalinist Russia, or Hitler’s Nazi Germany, mass murderer Bibi’s Gaza, or his staunch ally, Trump’s America, and its nasty ICE.

No. Evil has no borders or borderlines!

Life is not elsewhere!