Re-public day: Our constituted times...
26 Jan 2013 9:33 PM GMT
In the 64th year of our ‘framed’ freedom, one wonders what did the country constituted in the name of a republic. A harrowing sentimentality can enlist the frequency of despair which is often redefined in the ‘state’ we live in the country. Though despite a dramatic flavour it would taste as truth, it doesn’t conjure an imaginative answer to the sense of doom which persists and perhaps deepens every ‘political’ designated sentiment in the year. As much as one continues to denigrate the existing system and its pithy outplay, one isn’t situated outside the monopoly of this drama. One may not be a script writer of the play but surely ends up as the impromptu actor. And of course! The script is known too well for a fumble to happen. We all play along.
Binding the system and the common-ess of the man into a circular motion which runs in concentric circles evades finding a ‘squared’ sense of an answer: why are we the way we are? As much as the political system reeking of unmindful acts devoid of any imagination of the collective, why is the ‘commonality’ of the man so divorced from his own ethic of fairness, truth and just. Answers are sought in development and progress being misunderstood and tradition being lost to Western ideals culminating into a disenchanted society which breeds its own absence and a selective coloured inclusion.
Who makes this society – A political agenda? A community need? Or a strange collective called a group which brings with it its diversity as well as its cohesion. It’s the same cohesion which cohesively decides to imbibe certain features from tradition while innovating the practise. It’s the same diversity which protests against rape and yet fails to look to its own perpetuation of a ‘rape culture’. It’s the same ‘sense’ of the group which speaks of gender rights which freezes with the thought of bisexuality of one’s own kin – we are truly in sync with our internalised political ideology – we are a hypocrite republic belonging to a hypocritical political system.
As a group much of our sensibility draws from the external. Industrial and technological development progress finds its mirror in numbers and tangible production which is easy to identify with. Identification makes ones sense of belonging to this very system concrete. However this sense of belonging to an ‘objectified’ – object world is transitory.
With the nature of the outside being essentially dynamic – nothing manages to find its inside within us. The internal object world sustains itself on a conveyor belt of desire where object like packaged realities keep loading and unloading, nothing staying for long enough that can be called our own. The psychic realities of such a ‘part’ identifications often ruminate in search of the wholeness corresponding to a wholeness of self that it may provide and find themselves away from an internal depressed state to a manically dissociative shift into something attractive – exciting yet essentially outside. The society so driven by the sense of the collective suffers from the inability to reflect – or introspect within it self to perhaps realise that its become a part of a tragic system which is bound to fail it yet will continue to attract it. As a society perhaps we suffer from the ‘Meena Kumari complex’. Other than the psychoanalytical tale of Oedipus which meets its Indian counterpart in the lovelorn Devdas, the persuasion of Indian society as a tragic idiom persists too keenly. Our helplessness is deeply rooted in our own choice of our collapse. Some choice would have to be located in the spine of the modern man otherwise the shrewedness will be found only in the state with its phallus of power is tempted to castrate the democratic right to claim the mother; the country.
First, the desire and the blindness in the democracy also needs to be located which aspire to lay claim on the mother-land, however, fails to own up to its own need to do so projecting it outside as a retaliation against oppression. Not to say oppression doesn’t exist. However, in the absence of our admission of our own desire to claim, we as a society are doomed towards a blind future.
A social understanding of us in our times needs to be relegated to a larger canvas of ideationally introspecting and moving towards a reasoned reflection of self which lies in conjunction to desire and destruction of self and the other. However in this it forgets how the other is often the split off of self. The corrupt leader ‘up’ there isn’t an ‘other’ rather a choice of self – sometimes its own corrupt self which we can identity only when ‘othered’. A criticism of the political system needs to be situated in incarnating the public which is ‘re’-vised or ‘re’-defined in the times we have come to constitute.
The author is a research scholar at Ambedkar University
Binding the system and the common-ess of the man into a circular motion which runs in concentric circles evades finding a ‘squared’ sense of an answer: why are we the way we are? As much as the political system reeking of unmindful acts devoid of any imagination of the collective, why is the ‘commonality’ of the man so divorced from his own ethic of fairness, truth and just. Answers are sought in development and progress being misunderstood and tradition being lost to Western ideals culminating into a disenchanted society which breeds its own absence and a selective coloured inclusion.
Who makes this society – A political agenda? A community need? Or a strange collective called a group which brings with it its diversity as well as its cohesion. It’s the same cohesion which cohesively decides to imbibe certain features from tradition while innovating the practise. It’s the same diversity which protests against rape and yet fails to look to its own perpetuation of a ‘rape culture’. It’s the same ‘sense’ of the group which speaks of gender rights which freezes with the thought of bisexuality of one’s own kin – we are truly in sync with our internalised political ideology – we are a hypocrite republic belonging to a hypocritical political system.
As a group much of our sensibility draws from the external. Industrial and technological development progress finds its mirror in numbers and tangible production which is easy to identify with. Identification makes ones sense of belonging to this very system concrete. However this sense of belonging to an ‘objectified’ – object world is transitory.
With the nature of the outside being essentially dynamic – nothing manages to find its inside within us. The internal object world sustains itself on a conveyor belt of desire where object like packaged realities keep loading and unloading, nothing staying for long enough that can be called our own. The psychic realities of such a ‘part’ identifications often ruminate in search of the wholeness corresponding to a wholeness of self that it may provide and find themselves away from an internal depressed state to a manically dissociative shift into something attractive – exciting yet essentially outside. The society so driven by the sense of the collective suffers from the inability to reflect – or introspect within it self to perhaps realise that its become a part of a tragic system which is bound to fail it yet will continue to attract it. As a society perhaps we suffer from the ‘Meena Kumari complex’. Other than the psychoanalytical tale of Oedipus which meets its Indian counterpart in the lovelorn Devdas, the persuasion of Indian society as a tragic idiom persists too keenly. Our helplessness is deeply rooted in our own choice of our collapse. Some choice would have to be located in the spine of the modern man otherwise the shrewedness will be found only in the state with its phallus of power is tempted to castrate the democratic right to claim the mother; the country.
First, the desire and the blindness in the democracy also needs to be located which aspire to lay claim on the mother-land, however, fails to own up to its own need to do so projecting it outside as a retaliation against oppression. Not to say oppression doesn’t exist. However, in the absence of our admission of our own desire to claim, we as a society are doomed towards a blind future.
A social understanding of us in our times needs to be relegated to a larger canvas of ideationally introspecting and moving towards a reasoned reflection of self which lies in conjunction to desire and destruction of self and the other. However in this it forgets how the other is often the split off of self. The corrupt leader ‘up’ there isn’t an ‘other’ rather a choice of self – sometimes its own corrupt self which we can identity only when ‘othered’. A criticism of the political system needs to be situated in incarnating the public which is ‘re’-vised or ‘re’-defined in the times we have come to constitute.
The author is a research scholar at Ambedkar University
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