honestly

A living philosophy must answer the problems of today. - Jawaharlal nehru.

Honestly, I never wanted to write after that 5^th grade essay,” king of fruits mango” or to think beyond ant’s diabetic problems! Many claim that I should have stopped, many complain about the lack of conformity they are used to reading in 5^th grade essays.  Reason and this age has however taken the best of me, and I continue to scribble arbitrary nonsensical things about politics, economy, of which major philosophy belong to the dead, men and age.  However, then and now, this idea grips me that dead are more dear, and thus I try to be dead, only before dying.

           And how do I achieve this? I did it mostly by interacting less with the living, with an end goal of phasing out this small “irregularity”, as the encounter is believed among the dead. I was gravely mistaken. There are more dead than the living, not above, among the stars, but here on land. Not in graves or rivers, but in brick mansions. People, I realized, were smarter than me, instead of being dead like me; they simply, blindly, belong to schools of thoughts, thoughts which belong to the dead. And there was the trick I would never have understood if it were not for the institutions which claims to keep the idea living, ironically at a price of being themselves little or more dead!

                     As the greeting in braavos goes, valar morghulis, all living must die, it can’t be simply said that all dead were actually living. Those who lived worked hard for their ideas to survive through ages. They must have lived on a constant hysterical fear that their ideas, as great as they were, were always in danger of getting lost among the living men of the future. Only if they had known, that future would have been a battle among the mortals on land, over the same ideas borrowed from the stars.

                      I tried to however pushover some of these dead so that I could breath in solitude. Reason was not much helpful, it most of the time backfired, and somehow ended up proving their point. There is this appalling infatuation towards scientific application of history among the dead, only history is studied (scientifically) with numerous lenses, whichever survives the rigorous conformity of the already written words in the brain cells of the dead. It is not mindless conformity. It is the consensus and consciousness of the dead!

                     What did ancestors do? Some say, they took each other work’s and tried to rip apart line by line, word by word, their intellectual treatise by their new found wisdom! Some works were not bothered to be dealt in such a fashion, so the process short-circuited some discovery and attacked the already attacked works. This at times offended the men whose worked were not molested in the epistemological arena and they set to avenge such an insult by denouncing enemy’s work with their skills of critique. This process kept on the necessary heat aptly habitable for the living men.

                  What do we do? I asked one of the men, a carpenter, from the dead.

“We fight for the change?” He responded with the energy seen in the dead when faced with significant questions!

What change?  I asked .The most logical question of course.

He didn’t reply and was clearly upset. He put his tools of carpentry from right to left hand before leaving, frowning on me meanwhile. This gesture meant something to me. I ignored it just as the carpenter ignored the question. Another soldier of “change” might want to put it back into right hand. Honestly, I couldn’t care less till the tools are working, till they are in the hands of the living. Dead could flaunt the little red book, even if it is not read by him, or simply not understood by him. Living bears a more serious responsibility, that of their actions.

              What should we do? I asked another young fellow from the dead.

“We should love cow!” He responded.

“Why?” I thought and asked too. These types of questions are direct result of my being human, even dead.

He looked at me bewildered. His contempt was more callous than my question. This disproportionate displeasure seemed way beyond the composure of a man who was defending some creature’s right to live. What was ironical that he was ready to kill defending it, but not me, remember, I am already dead.

Anyway he cited history.

“Will you save the entire cow community or some cows?”

“Cows must be at the right place at the right time to be saved!”

And what time and place would that be?

“Somewhere between 5 years” I thought while he looked at his clock and left. Not to save cows of course, but to eat. Not a cow. Vegetarian, I suppose! Honestly, I think being cow loving is a good thing; some love it on their plate, some in their dairy, and some like it in politics.

           What can we do? I asked a TV journalist.

“We can tell people the truth and let them decide!” his was an answer which seemed sympathetic towards people, like the truth is indeed so confusing that people are bound to suffer. Truth, it seemed was like his pet animal that might run away from the leash but out of hunger it must return to him. He did not threaten to use that pet animal on anyone who disagrees, but warns of its tramp nature. Most of all he seemed to know about its habit. He seemed to possess a certain monopoly over truth.

He was so saddened by this plight of public that he had decided to take over the deciding part from the public, out of mere pity, to unburden them of it. He can simply run some equations with the popular truths momentarily and present the decision to public.

“They are left with the simple task of acting or not acting on it!” he declared proudly,

“Because” he added “to tell you the truth, they already know the truth, it bores them to death, so they like us to do a detailed postmortem of it!”

“But fiction is indeed a necessary evil you sometimes use?” I didn’t say lie, because he was the harbinger of truth.

“There is no such thing as fiction, it’s just creation of mind!” he asserted leaning forward. “The other day, we mentioned a rascal in our show, it just said; a rascal did a certain thing, somewhere. By the end of the day so many people called as to inquiring about why such evident part of his existence was used in that program without consulting him!!”

“Now, you see, so much for the branding of real life events as fiction” he said.

“But branding too is one of your special devices!?” I asked.

“Oh, it’s just the linguistic flair our boys fancy; it has its uses though! People don’t remember unless they could categorize, and place people and their motives accordingly, its scientific learning process!”

There was no end to this conversation, so unlike all the other talks where I held the gun and people faced the barrel and so naturally ran away, even when they were dead, this man was determined and I ran away with that gun still pointed at him. Surely there is some power in truth. At least in the way it is decorated and made presentable for T.V., for you know, who likes to see ugliness on the T.V screen?

                              Anyway, I am planning to come back to the living league and pursue my obnoxious

Writing and claim an opinion which I am entitled and obligated to keep. I might write a essay titled “king of fruits banana” just to tell the conformists that I am still alive.