The outsider
This blog is about making Mumbai your home. For an outsider like me, who came to Mumbai recently, this blog is a DIY and a self help forum rolled into one. Here you will find interviews, stories and profiles of people who, like me, have made Mumbai their home. Every now and then there will also be random provocative ranting about the city --- the kind that goes with blogs and invites evil from all directions. Hope to see you here more often. Rave on!
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I am humbled.
Newspapers published detailed articles about the documents you need to have to be able to prove your identity and vote; we explained how the electronic voting machine works, (though they have been around for more than a decade now); we asked you for your opinions and the issues that are close to your heart. Hundreds of hours of sponsored television news debates and talk shows and live reports poured down the tube everyday, but you didn't vote!
Instead you showed us how passive aggressive you are!
Who are you Dear Reader?
Are you a naxal? Well, I think you are.
In India, the middle classes have no constitutional right to boredom or disgust with the system. They are too well fed for that.
The Naxals are the only people who have a right to boredom and disgust with the system (they have earned this right after four decades; the government denies this; says the right was stolen; dispute is on). So if you're bored and disgusted with the system and express it by not voting, then you have to be a naxal. Nothing else explains your behaviour.
You are as much a naxal as Dr Binayak Sen. Okay now don't be all coy. You know who he is. Like you, he is a sympathizer currently lodged in Raipur Jail, waiting to be tried for something that you too, dear reader, one day will be held guilty of --- talking too loudly about a democratic government failing its people.
Surprised? You thought we wouldn't catch on?
Dear Reader, I am no alien to your capricious ways, your sudden need for excitement, your false pretence of boredom; I have seen enough of you. But being in Mumbai only a few months and having seen you in droves holding candles at the gateway monument after 26/11, I confess, I fell into the 'times-they are-a-changing' trap.
And then, maybe a month or so before the D-D day, the incessant drone of the idiot box and the newspapers and the radio and the hoardings took over. Like most papers the DNA too ran campaigns (thankfully we didn't have leadership contests) exhorting you to exercise the one right that appears to be a notch higher than the right to life and liberty. But like a drunken elephant, you refused to move. The middle class is the same everywhere, I guess.
I am aware of your naxal leanings, Dear Reader; make no mistakes. And let me tell you, the government knows that too. They know how much you hate their lot. They know how desperate you are for a system overhaul and they are going to get you! You could have fooled them by keeping appearances and voting. But you did nothing. You showed us how 58 per cent of the voting population, (all of them middle class, secretly naxal, English speaking, anal retentive), can shake up the largest democracy in the world simply by doing nothing. But you haven't shaken anything, let us be clear on that point. You think too highly of yourself, Dear Reader, and you shall pay the price of being a tad too clever for your own good.
What's worse, you and your naxal agenda has been exposed.
The government doesn't need the intelligence bureau to figure out that unlike rural areas, where Naxals have to be physically present to stall the electoral process by violence, the naxal ideas are so deep rooted in urban centres like Mumbai, especially in the middle class pockets, that one doesn't need guns to get people to not vote.
As you read this, Dear Reader, someone somewhere, is making a list of all the times you've gotten drunk and wanted a dictatorship in the country. All the times you've secretly shared your frustrations with the political leadership with friends or colleagues and all the times you've dreamt of slapping a politician on a podium the way Sanjay Dutt slapped Paresh Rawal in Mahesh Bhatt's Kabza.
FYI, Dear Reader, the government may not be able to get you to vote, but it can prove that you're a naxal. The case may take a while to build, but rest assured, it would take less time than the Bandra-Worli sea link. (Visit www.binayaksen.net to know more)
And then, when you're incarcerated for talking too much, you'll have no one to blame, but yourself. No one will raise a voice for you, you middle-class naxal. Even your neighbours won't sign your bail bond (not that you're offence will be bailable in the first place).
You will sign affidavit after affidavit saying all you ever did was do your job but no one will believe you. You will ask your captors where in the world is a simple tax paying citizen a radical communist and they will point to the heart of India on the map.
Dear reader, slowly you will learn how important appearances are. Maybe the solitude of the cell will teach you how to play the game of the happy family in the largest democracy of the world.
Hopefully, the import of what I am saying now will slowly trickle in later. You will realize that in these times of hyper nationalism a naxal is not defined by who he is but by who he is not: a yes man in a capitalist democracy.
Please let me know what you think.
Sincerely,
Mayank
Of Course. Appreciate editorial policy please. :)
The point is that there is no point and that is the point.
Prashant, I am contrite. Never intended a political diatribe. Hope I entertain you better next time around. Thanks for reading. Rave on!
Ram, I am no comrade.
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