The dying flame

Courts, governments and the bureaucracy are stuffed with people like us. They do not develop a higher IQ or reach a higher plan of intelligence because they occupy that position. Socially, they are shaped by the same influences we grew up with.

And look around you. Don't you have the nosy Uncle who wants to know who you're dating? The meddlesome neighbour who comments on what you wear? The irritating cousin who has an opinion on your career choice? The 'friend' who disapproves your eating habits?

I have known all of the above. Especially the last - a chap who ordered 'Tomato onion uthappa, don't put onion in it, and don't put onion on the sambar either."

We didn't care, we wanted the world to let us be, to wear what we liked, to love who we liked and eat, drink and make merry. We laughed at their quirks and brushed them off, thinking they lived in the past, even the young ones among them. The future was ours, the future was liberal, and hey - wasn't it more fun to have a kebab at a shady joint in Mahim with that inappropriately-dressed girl who really *got* you, than to worry about those people?

Well, something happened while we weren't looking. They earned money, because they followed the norms of the world as it existed, not as we thought it ought to be. They became top-ranking bureaucrats, they became judges, they got close to, or became, the political leadership of the country.

And now we wonder that they want to dictate to us what we eat, who we see and what we wear (among other things)?

Did we not try hard enough? Did we fail somewhere? Or is this just how it is - the worst of humanity destined to lord over the rest because it appeals to the darkness within?

I guess it is - they won the War a long time ago. The battles that have followed have only been meaningless skirmishes in a theatre where the end is already scripted.

Unless there is some way to tear up the script. Burn it. Write a better ending.

Maybe you can, gentle reader.

I suppose I should try too.

For I am a writer, and writers write.