The abject misery of existentialist angst
“Why are we here? Or rather why were Junoon, Tariq Amin and Hamid Mir here? What possible reason could there be for the existence of these hairy-chest Pakistanis?
You don’t know?
Moron! God sent them. Yes, God. Makes you think twice, huh?
They were the abomination before Dengue Fever.
John, the late canteenwallah at St. Patrick’s Govt. College, once in a deep state of meditation and while listening to late John Denver sing about the birds and the bees, said, ‘ buckwaas!’ Which sort of answered the question about Tariq Amin and Mir.
But what about you? Why were you put on this planet? Are you just another Tariq Amin or are you a fruit about to get Dengue Fever?
Maybe a cabbage is how you describe yourself. To tell you the truth, I really don’t give a damn. I don’t care why we are here. But I do care why I’m here and Angelina Jolie there!
However, my favourite all-time eternal question remains: “Why me?”
No one has ever been able to beat this one.
Imagine Ziaul Haq falling from the sky like a burning mass of tyranny and asking this question. Imagine Mulla Omar ducking American missiles and asking this question. Imagine Shilpa Shetty hearing herself laugh and asking this question. Imagine George W. Bush choking on a pretzel and asking this question. Imagine a woman standing with a cooking oil ka dabba in her hand, stuck forever in a kitchen and asking this question. Imagine a teenager given a suicide belt and asked to blow himself up in the name of Jihad asking this question. Imagine Musharraf looking at Wasi Zafar speak and asking this question. Imagine.
Makes you think, huh? Does it? Really?
Don’t fall over with all that blood rushing to your head. Consider art. Consider politics.
Our neuroses are defined by the questions we ask. The paranoid, the depressed, the totally screwed-up, they can all be classified by the questions they are always asking of themselves and others.
No sir. I never ask myself, “why me?” I look around and ask, “why you?”
Why are you always talking about ‘you’? Why is it always ‘Me?’ Why not talk about us? Of you and everybody else which makes up a generation?
The corporate machine and the capitalist Big Brother ( i.e. the market), wants you to be narcissistic. It’s then easy for it to sell the many useless creams, lotions, jeans and potions, colas and hyped commotions to the ‘me’ in you, while on the other end, the evangelist circus wants this ‘ me’ to want to desperately go to heaven for a price, which can be a heavy donation or an illogical, irrational blind submission.
This generation is narcissistic. Interested more in personal action and personal change rather than political change. They always want to ‘talk their demons out’ by talking openly about themselves. Their private lives become a glorified public soap opera. Both the corporate cheerleaders and the evangelist circus encourage this. Because this I-talk-about-me discourages creativity, individualism, universal ideals, and in turn encourages fad and fashion consciousness.
Politics and social causes are then taken up as fleeting fads, and these along with art become commercialized entertainment rather than a heroic effort.
The MBAs and the yuppies of this generation follow blindly their corporate overlords. Overlords of a system busy expanding a prosperous and numbed-by-perks class of young executives and young capitalists. Materially comfortable (and usually intellectually absent). Instead of helping the poor and the underprivileged, they are an active part of a belief system that marginalize and even outcast them, saying they are no-good and “don’t want to work;” accusing them of jealousy and laziness.
Why? Of course, the poor, scrubby buggers fail to realise that ‘free-market system and the corporate machine is the wonderful embodiment of freedom.’
The ‘free’ executive class and their ‘pious’ allies are too busy doing well to do any good!
Yes, sir. I never ask myself, ‘why me?’ I look around and ask, ‘why you?’
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kya baat hai sir!!!
very interesting.
i’m adding in RSS Reader