The only remnant now of my career as a tool of the advertising industry was the box I was carrying. It had stationery in it, some sketches and a long list of things I had been preparing for ages. I looked down at my little symbols of oppression. It was not easy to come to terms with the step that I had just taken. Everything was going to change. Everything was delightfully uncertain again. I trembled. A fresh breath of diesel was all I needed to bring me back to my senses.
I chose to enjoy my moment of freedom. In my strut of defiance I remembered my first interview ever. It was with an electronics manufacturing company. I recalled the interviewer’s response when I told him that I thought his work was boring. I thought of all the opportunities that I had been given, as a student and even as an adman. Nothing quite excited me. Motivation had been really hard to come by. Not this time though. Not ever again.
My reverie was interrupted by a sight that made me burn with rage. There was a huge billboard pasted low, by the sidewalk. It had the picture of some famous model’s famous rear. She was wearing nothing but a string of diamonds. The background was kohl black and only her body with the diamonds on it was lit. It glowed in the afternoon sun like a bush on fire. The gothic caption read:
Drape her in stars.
She deserves nothing less.
E.N.V. Diamonds
In front of this monstrosity there was a little boy, not more than eight years old. He was in tattered clothes, skipping along with a slingshot in his hand. He was coming towards me. I smiled to myself, seeing how happy he was. I stepped playfully from side to side to stop him. He looked at me in mock anger, nose goo dripping from his tiny nostrils. The grand canyon of disparities lay before me.
‘What’s the matter?’ he snapped, his eyes bright and curious.
‘Nothing,’ I said. ‘Heading off to school?’
He rubbed the grey-green refuse off his face and wiped it on his shirt. Lifting his slingshot up and aiming for my face he said:
‘Mazaak karta hai kya?’
I raised my right hand in surrender, almost losing control of the box. The slingshot was lowered and no one was hurt. The crisis had been averted. I felt bad and let the young gentleman pass.
I wanted to tell him to go to school, but didn’t. What good would it be? The poor chap would study, get a job and then work the rest of his life trying to afford those stones from the billboard. I had heard the kids in the street talk about the cars they wanted to buy, the big houses and the lush farms. Why are our dreams always dollar green in colour? Why does a child of seven want to be driven around in a Mercedes instead of an Esteem? Is it fundamentally wrong to dream of doing ‘well’? I guess not. I am no one to tell a person who has had to struggle all his life that he shouldn’t enjoy the basic things that he can enjoy. I have the luxury of my thoughts because I don’t have to worry about two square meals a day, a decent home, money in the bank. But should greed be the motivation for any kind of activity? Should lust be the driver? This greed and this very lust that we fuel from the moment we know we are alive is the cause of all our problems. It is the cause of corruption and crime. As long as you want, you can never be happy. That of course is the biggest goof of all time. Most of us know precisely what we want to do with our next three salaries, largely thanks to sad fuckers like me.
Why do people like diamonds? Why is commitment in a romantic relationship not considered serious unless its sealed with a diamond ring? If you don’t get the girl you love a diamond ring, do you love her any less?
In a state where pop satisfaction is everyone’s immediate goal, what we value today is increasingly defined by a series of biases that we’ve been fed by the system.
The system is your parents, your government, your television and your goddam radio. Anything and everything has been a part of this brainwashing campaign where we’ve all been taught to value ‘things’. The kid in the street has access to the system too and he’s learning fast.
Your brother in the States is successful if he just bought a new car. Your government is doing well if it just got the approval of some other fuck all nation’s lunatic leader. Your day was improved by the fact that you could use a coupon at your favourite designer coffee shop, all because you’re a preferred customer. Your girlfriend loves you more for spending a couple of thousand extra on a necklace for her, because giving a necklace shows that you care. Valuing things implies valuing people. A beautiful scam.
What about real value? What about everything that would be left if we took away the house, car, business card, cell-phone, monogrammed Italian silk pyjamas and the electric toothbrush? What would you be? What’s inside you? What drives you other than the false sense of superiority and satisfaction that you get from material goods and lame pats on the back that mean nothing?
We’ve been blinded by the propaganda. We’re consumers first and humans later.
We’re in a society where people consider it legitimate to sell their bodies and souls for a shot at the ‘good’ life. It is all seen as a suitable means to get what you think you deserve. We’ve polished human desires and fired imaginations to the extent that each and every one of us has an elaborate fantasy to fulfil. Little do we realize that we don’t need much to be happy. We don’t realize or appreciate how much we already have in pursuit of things we may never find. Often things that we want to afford.
‘You’re doing well for yourself, Pranav. You too, Abhay. We’re proud of you.’ His proud mother claimed.
‘Yes Amma, see we got this new couch. Nothing beats watching a match on this thing.’
‘He’s right, Aunty, it has the most perfect ass-indentation for the young Indian male.’
Human desires defined and chiselled to perfection.
The spring in my step was back.
I got to my place, put the box and bag aside and went straight for the fridge. I thought a 1.15 p.m. beer would be a good idea, a nice way to mark my newly acquired state of unemployment.
My flat looked so different, so new to me. Never had I seen it in the afternoon on a weekday before. Damn, so this is what it feels like! A quitter at home with all the cares of the world on his mind, I listened intently for something to break the monotony of the silence. There was nothing. It was eerie.
I sat sipping quietly, staring out at the main road. Pondering about what I should do. A lot of my time, I found, had been spent just as a spectator. Fortunately, the whole ‘monkey see, monkey do’ adage had failed for me. I watched the Kingfisher disappear. Then I got another.
I wandered around the apartment gathering all my papers, sketches and essays. I no longer felt ashamed to read my own work. I felt that the hypocrisy had passed.
Printouts, handwritten speeches, rants in my notebooks; I read them all, scattering papers as I worked through the thick stack. The bricolage grew. It was like a beautiful cloudy sky, patches of white here and there with an occasional splatter of paint. I sat before it, looking for my answers. Imagining what my course of action would be. I started making two piles: ‘Publishable’ and ‘Not’.
So far none of my work had made it anywhere outside my school and college publications. This, of course, had not deterred me from writing, ever.
Another trip to the publishers’ was in store for me, I thought. There was no time to waste. I had spoken to a few people about this before. I had to delve deep into my stash for a solution. The earlier attempts had all been discouraging. ‘I hope you weren’t counting on this working out for you’ and other such clichés were all I received. They thought that a guy like me didn’t have a chance. They thought I preached too much through my writing. They were right. Some of them even laughed. All I ever heard was ‘No’, from people who had come to hate my guts, perhaps because I was a little too persistent. I was unsure of whether I had it in me to go through that again. Was it truly the way for me? To be heard and to have an impact, I thought my ideas needed a bigger canvas.
I started thinking about how people get heard. I started seeing how hopeless the exi
sting channels of communication were.
Another beer went down. I read and reread the pieces. I laid them out all over the floor, short of pasting them on the walls. Lying back on them, I picked up piece after piece for inspection.
‘What are those guys going to see in this?’
‘Who’s going to ride your wild horses?’ Monsieur Bono asked in his earnest voice.
Beer number four. I paced up and down the drawing room. We had a tall oval mirror in front of the main entrance. I stopped in front of it, thinking. Looking at myself …
‘Should you be the crazy guy distributing fliers at the train station? Who’s going to hear you then, huh? ’the fuck’s the matter with you?’
For some reason the mirror spoke with a New York Italian accent. Too much Scorsese I presumed.
There had to be rock star publicity tied up with a strong message. It had to be the kind of message you couldn’t ignore.
Five beers down and my six-pack was fast disappearing. I walked to my desk and held on to the chair. The room seemed a little wavy now, moving in fits and starts. Fortunately, the turmoil was only on the outside. For, in my mind everything was clear. I had discovered my path. I had the confidence and belief that can come only after downing almost three litres of beer.
I sat down and reached for a pen. I laughed out loud. Shivering, I pulled a blank A4 towards myself and wrote these words on the top of the page:
The Anarchist Project
by
Pranav Kumar
The wall in front of my desk had never seemed so beautiful. Gentle cracks reached desperately for the ceiling. The dull light from my lamp caressing them, as though it were trying to pull them down. These cracks are going places. These cracks are going to touch the ceiling.
With that thought I fell asleep right there. At my table.
5. REVERIE
In my slumber things that I had abandoned and locked away as memorable moments from someone else’s life now came back to me as my own dreams. I thought of Shahnaz and her shenanigans.
We had always been a little different from our other friends, Shahnaz and I. She wrote a lot too. With enviable regularity she would articulate my opinions and thoughts in a way that I couldn’t. This was a girl who was reading Chomsky at fourteen while her friends grappled with Sweet Valley High and the like. Then there was her long Ayn Rand phase or to be more precise: her long The Fountainhead phase. She’d talk passionately about Howard Roark and then she’d sigh unhappily, lamenting that ‘he was impossible’. Her dad was an architect and he’d laugh at her illusions about Howard. She’d get upset and call me. We’d talk at length about things she had read or about what was in the papers. She kept a little scrapbook of events that moved her. I started contributing to it too, and with time it grew. We had our own little journal of influences and opinions. We knew all the stands and most of the arguments. We became outcasts in our homes for being ‘depressive’. The morbid fascination with taking everything personally can be trying for even the most patient parent.
I remember when she came to my house once after a fight with her father. We had been in the last year of school. Shahnaz’s family had been neck-deep in wedding preparations; her sister Sarah was to be married that weekend. In the midst of all the last-minute preparations and excitement, Shahnaz had made the ridiculous demand that she be allowed to go and volunteer at a nearby village where people were dying because of a famine caused by drought. Needless to say, there had been a lot of tension at home.
‘If you won’t let me go, at least scale it down, Pa, scale it all down. Let’s not do this. People are dying of hunger and thirst not fifty kilometres from here and here we are having this lavish wedding. It’s not right. You know that …’ she had pleaded, outraged at how unaffected everyone seemed by the unfolding tragedy.
But her father had been firm. ‘Our lives have to go on, Shahnaz, regardless of what’s happening out there. It is not our problem, child! You must learn to live with the sadness that surrounds you. You can be affected by these events. In fact, you should be. You’re a sensitive young girl and I’m proud of you. But you have to understand that this is an important and auspicious occasion for the family … we have to make the best of it.’
That was when she walked out. Taking a beating and being handed consolation prizes was common for me and her. She came to my place looking for me to share her disbelief at how unmoved her family was. I tried.
I believe we’re all born revolutionaries, with clear ideas of right and wrong; things are put into black and white for us by parents, uncles, aunties and the rest of the village that raises a child. It’s when you hit adolescence that things begin to change. Those early teenage years when disparities eat into you and you feel like a communist: self-righteous, well meaning and easily angered. And then you segue into your lusting late teens, when you feel like a capitalist of sorts. You feel like you can and should get what you think you deserve. You feel people can and should fend for themselves. You hit the ultimate stage of this cycle after a few years of work, when you’re a few years away from thirty. That’s when you become a cynic, a pseudo-pacifist, not easily moved, not affected by anyone but yourself, looking out for no one else but yourself.
I was sick of being told that we were just kids whenever we would clash with our parents. We were supposed to get carried away it seemed. Nodding understandingly, they told us we’d outgrow it. However, some of us, in this crude life cycle, refused to grow up.
Well, to a certain extent we did. We were still affected by the disparities around us. The outrage still existed. Somehow though, it never translated into anything beyond a sour discussion. We had become the people we hated: loud, opinionated, compulsive coffee-drinkers with a lot to say but nothing to offer in the form of action.
I remember standing in my little veranda, watching her walk down the lane towards my house: an angry, quiet and hurt spot of clarity on the otherwise blurry streets. She stood at the gate and looked me in the eye. When I walked to the gate, concerned, she calmed herself to say this to me, her eyes bright with welling tears:
‘We need to get out of here or change this place.’
6. THE FIRST ALTERNATIVE
The agitated fluttering woke me up. Squawks of desperation echoed in my head as I tried to regain my senses. A pigeon was trapped inside my room. It was flying about, bumping into the large panes of the glass door, the cupboard and, of course, the windows, trying to exit the way it had entered. As I sat groggily watching the pigeon fly about, Abhay ran in.
‘What’s going on?’
‘There’s a bird trapped inside.’ I yawned.
‘Damn, anyone trapped with you should be set free ASAP.’
‘Well, hurry up then!’ I played along.
He chuckled as he opened the windows with a great heave. We watched the little pigeon as she figured out what had just happened. Abhay stood expectantly over her, waving his arms towards the gaping exit. Our chirping companion seemed confused at first and she approached the opening with caution.
‘Go on, now!’ exclaimed Abhay. She fluttered once more and then with the flap of a wing was out on her way to freedom again.
‘Well, that was an ordeal. I hope it didn’t injure itself bumping around in this place,’ I said.
‘Forget it! She’s fine,’ he said while walking out of the room. ‘I’m cooking rice and sambhar. Get ready for the greatest combination of herbs you’ve ever tasted.’
‘Sounds good. Man, you’re like a female Sanjeev Kapoor,’ I teased as I stretched and stood. ‘When did you get home? I never realized you were back.’
‘Just about an hour ago. What time did you get back?’
I walked away towards the loo. I knew there’d be a loud response to my next statement.
‘I’ve been here since 1.15. I quit today.’
That was enough for him to launch off into a furious avalanche of questions and imprecations. I shut the door promptly.
‘We’ll talk about this
when I get out, I’d like to pee in peace,’ I said from inside.
An hour had passed. The dal and rice sat uncooked, soaking in water. Abhay sat stupefied.
‘This is not going to be easy,’ he said with a sense of profundity and deep concern.
‘Not for anyone,’ I agreed.
‘What are your parents going to say?’
I thought this was uncharacteristically delayed, even for an afterthought, coming from Abhay.
‘I’ll handle them, I’ll tell them I’m looking for something else.’
‘Will this “something else” pay the rent?’
‘I have a decent stash to tide me through for a while. Don’t worry about rent.’
‘Tell me once again why you did this?’
‘I couldn’t take it any more, man. That’s all. Not going to be a tool.’
‘I see,’ he said thoughtfully. ‘So I’m a tool?’
‘No, you aren’t directly pumping the system with fuel. You’re just a minion, a victim at best.’
‘Good to know,’ he mocked me. ‘So what are you going to do?’
‘Change is in order. I want to be the agent.’
‘That’s a lot clearer, Plato. Care to quit talking in riddles and clarify for the Republic?’
‘I’ve got plans. I’m going to get published. I’m going to talk about things that people have stopped thinking about today. I want to demonstrate how we’re all becoming machines chasing material goods and pop satisfaction.’
He seemed rattled.
‘You know how those jaunts to the publishers end. Have you got new stuff?’
‘I’m packaging my writing in a new way. Might work.’
He got up and walked to the kitchen.
‘It’s your choice, giving up a perfectly good, high-paying job to be pushed around by publishers who hate you.’ He had done this speech before. ‘I know how you worked your way up, man, it’s not easy to get where you were.’
THE DIARY OF AN UNREASONABLE MAN Page 4