Run, Hamsters Run…

“Your son was a hero”, said they, “he will never be forgotten and you shall never be helpless. He is immortal.” “No he is not, the fool”, said she.

English is a funny language. It labels a limited number of things, happenings and feelings with a million different names depending on how it looks from the point of view of the limited and twisted individual mind. For example, sacrifice and compromise are one and the same act but different for different points of view. Anyone who, at this point, thinks I’m over-simplifying, that little red button with an x on it on the top right corner of this window is just for you.

I’m going to discuss a couple of funny words here – patriotism and martyrdom. Let us look at a case study – the Nazis. They fought more than half of the world and killed for apparently random reasons and acted like barbarians and beasts. That much we all agree about. And every soldier who fell in the battle field fighting those madmen was a right patriot. But what were the Nazis? Patriots? Patriots. And, believe me, they must have much greater patriots to have blinded themselves to the fact of the sheer manslaughter they caused with their own hands in the name of a far-out philosophy called Aryan supremacy. The Gestapo or even the CIA for that matter? Patriots. So who is a patriot?

The answer, in most simple terms, is – an individual who believes and trusts his nation’s philosophy, even so much that he is ready even to die and kill for it. And by what is this trust of his informed? By what is he inspired to give up his all in the name of something that may be as irrational as Aryan supremacy or a communist state for that matter? You don’t have to be a conspiracy theorist like me to see the ugly, twisted hands of the state in the whole stinking idea. They told you what is correct and what is the correct way to put what is correct and what to do if you want what is correct to prevail. They told you what your culture is. They told you what your way of life is. They told you what your social standing is. And this ‘they’ I harp about is not just a parliament or oligarchic conspirators putting their convoluted brains together to make paper puppets of you and me. ‘They’ is the state, the institution that we put up there to govern our unhappy selves. And ‘they’ don’t have a choice either. The easiest, but mind you, not the only, way to peacefully govern millions of people is make them hamsters in a wheel of their own running towards a treat but staying in one place. So was the genius of a very great distorted and gnarled brain somewhere and the rest of the world followed suit.

Patriotism is an idea of being one with a nation and taking the responsibility of maintaining and protecting. Sure, it’s a good idea, but it is not ‘the idea’. Because patriotism is the final and the biggest circle of limitation one can draw within a human being’s existence as the universal mind and soul. It is the strongest, biggest and the fanciest shackles you can bind yourself in.

Now lets us look at the funny words again – patriotism and martyrdom. And this is how they look to me now. ‘Patriotism’ looks more like ‘conformism’. An organism shall become one of them and help them protect their idea of right and wrong and it shall be rewarded justly by being called a patriot. And if the organism, in the act of protection is unlucky or stupid enough or both to lose its very existence, it is rewarded even more and made immortal by being labeled a martyr. So martyrdom, as logically follows, is the prosthetic limb that a government gives to the family of the fool who unwittingly lost his life in the pursuit or protection of an intangible principle. Oversimplification? The red button, please.

The big difference between me and my father is that he believes in democracy and I do not. I don’t expect any of you to do the same. But, for calling yourselves thinking voters and would-be voters, all I ask is - Do you know who is pulling your strings?

But I don’t expect all of you to be as sharp either. So let it be.