“See Ma’am, frankly speaking this problem can’t be solved by us police or military. The problem with these tribals is they don’t understand greed. Unless they become greedy, there’s no hope for us. I have told my boss, remove the force and instead put a TV in every home. Everything will be automatically sorted out.”
The above are lines by a SP, taken from an Arundhati Roy article on Maoists that appeared in The Outlook magazine.
The war against Maoists is more than just about a nation’s sovereignty or about minerals that the tribals are sitting on. It truly is, as our government claims, about bringing those tribals into mainstream. They cannot be allowed to sit there alone with a culture and richness of their own and be a pimple on the otherwise ubiquitous smoothness. It is about aesthetics but more than that it is about the need to show them a better way to live. A life style where happiness can be taken for a test drive out of big glass- showrooms and spirituality can be wrapped in glossy plastic to be sold to whoever may be willing to buy it. Where love can be wired internationally and dreams can be downloaded from any online store. Television is just one of the tool used for flattening, education is another.
But it’s not the welfare of tribals that I am concerned about. It is something else. The world, as I heard lately, is turning flat and somehow this is supposed to mean something good. People are born and nurtured into a standard template. Muslims drop their beards to appear harmless and Asians mask their accents to get jobs. To strive for normalcy is common and to be common is good because it is normal. Rat in a maze is more than an algorithm-problem; it is a lifestyle. Fashions and ideologies are global and often interchangeable. Those who lag behind in fashion are guided by glossy and colorful hoardings and billboards on their way. People are categorized and compartmentalized based on statistics and statistics matter more than life itself. And because this is all good for business, without caring much about what is puncturing/ bulldozing the world to flatness we are ready to take absolute flatness as the hallowed aspiration of the civilization.
Development is a name they invented to provide the atheists of post-modern era to worship and then it filled the hole left behind by the death of God. I know it is just a name but then only a name could replace God. Names abstract perception from meaning and thus can make an entity be loved or hated independent of its truth. Nice names made atom bombs sound cute. And now that development is sacred, it demands sacrifice. It is as this sacrifice that we are beginning to live in a market now. Every city is like other every other city. It is like living in a big Pizza Hut. We live, and die, acting as a consumer and a laborer alternatively. We are even referred to as capital, as human resource or labor market and we don’t mind such dehumanization. Any other role we may wish to take up is just a deviation and a waste of time. We do not want to be freaks or punks. If we are not a seller or a buyer, what justification do we have for our existence?
Look at the privacy-deprived lives of millions of people who have to live in flats and slums that look like cages for poultry. Or go to any shopping mall on a Saturday or Sunday and you will find the cattle class grazing in large numbers there. Excuse me; I should use my words carefully. Once someone had referred to cattle class as cattle class and they were all so offended that they slapped that smug smile off his face. Nobody contradicted him but they all said it was a sad thing to say. And sad it was because often it is sadist to say the truth. Especially, when it hurts the little pride that most of us have to live with. Even more so because it risks the downfall of the whole setup. It is a big project and tacitness is an indispensable discipline. It’s a big dream they have induced and nobody is allowed to wake anyone up. You have to walk with softest of steps. And when dead silence is an ingredient, truth is ineffable.
In all of this, arts have been reduced to petty entertainment meant to please the tired laborers and clerks every night so that they may work better and harder next day. They have been reduced to being refreshment for tired minds and bodies. But arts and culture are meant to be more than prostitutes. They do not need to derive meaning from dynamics of civilization, they are meant to provide meaning to it. They are supposed to be an end in themselves. And by arts I don’t just mean paintings, sculpting, literature or philosophy. I refer to any expression of human knowledge and condition, from Einstein’s relativity to Kafka’s Trial and to the dances and rituals of tribals of Chhattisgarh. Irrespective of whether that expression entertains us or not and whether we can apply it to our daily use or not.
In absence of these arts, in an ideally flat world, a world of economics, if technology is able to keep pace with flattening, we would all be cyborgs. If it does not, we’d all be zombies. We would all be instances of same definition. Our individualities would be obliterated to the extent that even our names will not be important. We’ll all have our alphanumeric roll numbers with pound signs and underscores. We will be grown in fields, ground preparation for which has begun.
This may sound like speculation of a cynic but it’s more than that. It is about the concern for human spirit that should define us but which we are ready to exchange, cheaply, for a place in statistics as aggregates.
“ No shepherd, and one herd! Every one wanteth the same; ever one is equal: he who hath other sentiments goeth voluntarily into the madhouse.” - Friedrich Nietzsche on a state that he feared mankind might tumble into.
