HUMANS OR HYDROCARBONS ?

Ken Saro-Wiwa
Jobless as I sometimes am , i felt like adding a new post to today's archives . You know , for some reason , I keep on remembering a story I read , Ken Saro-Wiwa's ' Africa kills her Sun ' . Nice abstract title , huh ?Written in the form of a condemned man's last letter to his former girlfriend, “Africa Kills Her Sun” constitutes a dark satire on the effects of corruption and in Nigerian society and Africa in general. Democracy came too late to save the author. Saro-Wiwa was imprisoned first in 1993 and again in 1994 for his political activism on behalf of his native Ogoni people ... He was executed by the Nigerian Millitary in 1995, his death provoking international outrage . The story is based in a prison in Nigeria as three men on death row go through their final moments . One of the very poignant moments of the story is perhaps when the protagonist justifies his becoming a bandit by citing the example of an Italian prostitute who looked at prostitution as just another profession . Fed up with the corruption in the system , he also claims to have turned into a bandit , which according to him is just another occupation in the land of the unjust . He made a choice , just as he makes a choice in the end when he stands up to the biased judge and demands death penalty . Standing in the swirling whirlpool of the mundane life that one finds in pilani , it is rather strange that I refer to a story in war-torn Nigeria . It is just that , as far-fetched to the context the characters might be , it is their ability to stand apart from the crowd and make their own choices , that makes them special . Today most of us are part of a framework of teeming billions - our soceity . We do what we are told , and any deviation is looked down upon . The fire in our hearts is constrained till one day it becimes ice and the person becomes a automaton - the ideal member of a soceity . Our life becomes more and more directionless as we continue in searches that we often don't even believe in . We end up in a controlled streamlined life that goes on in one direction . We become a digit in the infinite matrix of modern-day life . Just waiting to be erased with our physical demise .
Number deleted .
This process is continuous .
As we transform .
From human to hydrocarbon .
Was that your dream , gentlemen ?

AM I THE ONLY ONE ?

Weird egoistical way of starting something isn't this ? But as my friends keep on saying , I am a weird guy . What kind of a weird guy , I ask ? REALLY WEIRD !!! I'm told . And I go on living with it . The taunts and the snorts of laughter . The feeling of being used when you are needed and thrown away and spat at like a dirty rag when you are not . My life is a pretty strange one . I am not special , I am just different . I am a bong , and sometimes i don't feel all that proud to announce it . And I am eccentric too . Are not all bongs , I am asked . With my permanently tongue-tied dumb face , I can't think of a suitable reply before I am verbally screwed again and again . Dumb Bong , Dumb bong , DUMB BONG !!!! Nice name right ? Rhymes with ping-pong , ding-dong , sing-a-song ?? Hey Bong , do you like poetry ? Do you fag, bong ? Do you drink or dope ? No , I say , and Bang !!!! Dumb Bong is not even Bong , man !!! He is an insult to Bong hood . Seems funny doesn't it ? A stuck-up eccentric being fucked for being a Bong and then suddenly he isn't even even a Bong !!! COOOL MAAANN !! But you know , even as I try to wash off the insults and continous humiliation i am subjected to , a tinge of a lost identity just remains . You know , something like those acid stains on your shirt that are never washed off . It is like a vaccuum in your soul - a yearning for the respect your heart feels it deserves . But i never got it . I am different from the rest , but it is because i want a touch of individuality in my life . I could have changed , but I did not . Isn't it because i'm dumb , you ask ? Maybe . Maybe not . I like to think it is not . I dream that the answer is that even now , i want just go back to the care-free days that were once mine . I want to lie on a mountain and feel the wind as i gaze at the starry skies . I want to dream again and I that is why , I do not want to become another drop in the vast ocean of normality . And if that means that I live with being treated like shit , so be it . One day , in this life or another I will reach my place under the stars . And once there , I will gaze up and I'll dream again .
"But I being poor, have only my dreams, I have spread my dreams under your feet, tread softly because you tread on my dreams." ( W.B. Yeats)

From the devil's pits to the starry skies -

CAN YOU HEAR ME ??

I would request whoever is reading this , (hoping that someone ever does ) not to think that this is one of those extracts from an astronomer's journal . I am not a stargazer , and have really a lot to worry about other than green people coming and attacking me . This is just a portal , a window perhaps , from which today I suddenly felt the urge to shout out . To scream , and to lament , about the world all around me . To add the view of another dreamer who feels the last dregs of optimism being drained out of him . The overwhelming gruesome quicksand of negativity pulls me down to its very depths , inch by inch , slowly but steadily through every moment of my life . As I keep on looking . And try to dream of dreaming . This is Arnab Hazra , and I will not go down without a fight .