The world has two kinds of people, one, the ones who do hard work to get by, and others who snatch and seize what others have. More often than not it is the second kind which ends up having power. The first kind believes in law, morality, ethics and conventions and consequently traditions and the second kind depends on instrumentalism, using them as a strategic instrument to gain more wealth and and power and cement consolidation. The second kind's whole game is based on ignorance, innocence and population of the first kind. The first kind until and unless they have had experiences and they have learned from them can't believe that someone can manipulate the law, ethics, morality, conventions and this ignorance becomes the root cause of their exploitation. When the second kind has established power firmly, when they have consolidated it and the power dynamic has become absolute, irreversible and non-negotiable it is when the game of impunity starts. Habitual impunity is like a drug. Being in power means you can't be punished and that leads to impunity, but like a drug impunity demands a bigger dose everytime to release the chemicals that it releases in the brain, mostly the pleasure felt from the suffering of others, sadism or schadenfreude, and it when the second kind starts being creative with sadistic games, it's like experimenting with new drugs, which a common man thinks of as an act of God. The first kind, as I ended up realising, is exposed, it has no security and is at the mercy of the second kind which is way too deep in sadism, schadenfreude and megalomania to even understand the minds of those who believe in following ideals, laws and rules. Good people are exposed because power is predatory, and a good man or woman always has to think about saving their asses whereas predators' full focus is on finding an innocent person and playing sadistic games. Sadism is institutionalised in in this country and the idealism of post-independence is gone. When we talk about power it is better to think of the TV series Game of Thrones as a documentary. Power is almost exclusively seized through deception, conspiracies and brute force and so it always goes to scoundrels, and these scoundrels then employ more scoundrels through patronage and impunity as an incentive which includes rape. A good person who is an idealist, or who is diligent, who wants to do his work in the best way possible then becomes a target because there is inherent jealousy towards the good person in the scoundrels employed by the scoundrels. Law-abiding, diligent citizen is then just cattle which the scoundrels rear to achieve their goals which of course are more wealth and greater consolidation of power. Law in this kind of setting just becomes an expression of existential entrapment at the physical plane and an instrument of lawfare.
Life is all about prioritising. When I was younger I used to believe in the higher purpose but in the past decade I ended up realising that there is no higher purpose and this is due to the invasive political arrangement of this country and since this invasive political arrangement can be in a third-world country that we live in it is safe to assume that it would be present in the rest of the world too and thus existence of a higher purpose is out of question because people's choices and opportunities are rigged. It is the same as meaning, meaning doesn't exist. But then no one stops you from believing in a higher purpose or giving meaning to your life, at least visibly. In the past decade meaning has been drained out of people's lives. I do not feel as deeply about my interests like literature and science anymore and it is not because of age. But one should keep a semblance of meaning in their life and an idea of what their higher purpose could have been. The bottom line truths are very basic and they are family and money in any order you choose. You gain and develop skills throughout your life and then use it to earn money. Important thing here is to never give up a genuine interest. You studied something you didn't want to study for earning money it's not a problem, keep studying and training in what you were genuinely interested in and I say this because one, studying something that you are genuinely interested in is not hard work and is a sort of recreation and two, it retains meaning in your life. One has to understand the arrangement that we live in. The tyranny is individualised. And this means while one person feels like he lives in a dictatorship where even his personal choices are dictated, other feels like he is in a liberal utopia and another gets to practice impune anarchy mostly at the expense of others. A lot of people especially in the hinterlands live in an unannounced slavery and shit gets serious when one realises that freedom as basic as being able to feel the natural breeze on the skin can be withheld and, as I have observed, for no actual reason except baseless hatred and whims. I was a grateful person in general, despite having nothing to be grateful about at a personal level, what I survived, what I achieved, is solely due to my choices if you get the drift of this statement. This is the whole game, making people thankful and grateful that things are not worse and when one thinks of it one realises that it is a sort of blackmail and I wouldn't have been writing about it if I hadn't come to know how local the origins of the fate and the providence that blackmails people are. It's just your local mafia, politician and godman. When this reality comes to the fore the new age spirituality of being grateful collpases. And it is here you must prioritise. You know what higher purpose you would have chosen so despite it being redundant in the political setting we live in one must acknowledge it, one must align oneself to what gives meaning to one's life. What I have learnt in the past decade is that you can't help people in this nation anymore, their fates are already sealed. The disease of the society that was latent in Congress administration is now for all to see. Because Congress or BJP were never the real administration.
I have been to the bowels of this country and I have learnt things. The primary thing that I realised that this country at its depth revels in stratification, inducing suffering and invalidating experiences and sometimes the whole lives of people. The base emotion is breaking legs of people and then ridiculing them for not being able to run the race of survival. I am pretty straightforward and mind my business person but the voyeuristic and predatory setup doesn't really allow a person to mind his own business. People's wills are broken so that they just become bodybags of their own lives. Everything is stratified engineering colleges, medical degrees, which I earlier found to be okay after all IITs are better than a Tier 3 college but then I realised, firstly that meritocracy is a scam, secondly if you are from a Tier 3 college you will be exploited your whole life for that and in such a way that it will hinder your actual job and thirdly the whole ontology and how things are done differs between strata and that means a person who has studied the same syllabus will act differently when he is in Tier 1 setup and if he is Tier 4 setup with high chances that a person operating with his skills in a Tier 4 setup has his will broken if he is a good person and if he is not then he has turned predatory. The top cream in anything in this country is already selected and if it is selected from diffrent background than top cream then there is dirt collection on him so that he can be manipulated at will. There is nothing left to chance and real dedication and loyalty means nothing, dedication and loyalty are extracted through forced patronage and existential blackmail. The most mind boggling thing that I realised was that people are prevented from experiencing their own lives. The base of this country as I was able to see is rape, hypocrisy, jealousy and opportunism and when these things are the base, if they are true for one person they are true for all as it then becomes the bottom line and that means when the bubble of delusion pops it is this you are going to see. You have to choose your own skill that you want to master and become better at and it is better if there are more than one skills, one professional and at least one at the personal level. I have seen the amount of force used that I haven't seen being used even on terrorists and this is when I was a mind my own business and come home and read books and play videogames kind of a person. I got to become intimate with base of this nation and realised that it is essentially operated by individuals who are genocidal rapists and who employ genocidal rapists from the lower classes for manipulation of families and do social engineering. My deal is simple, I judge organisms by their ability to feel pain and their sentience and I realise people with depth, good people who believe in God are being manipulated by straight Pavlovian psychology. If you feel anxiety and humiliation going somewhere, you won't go there or if you feel better going somewhere even if it harms you you will go there, these are the simple principles on which this nation operates. Of course the world is complex, but this is the bottom line and it is at this bottom line all the complexity of the world simplifies. If someone doesn't like your face, and even if you do not know them, you can reach a place where there is no God, no government and no law. Just a boot of power crushing your face worn by individuals who if they hadn't been employed would have been pulling rickshaws or peddling drugs. It is here my sympathy for lower classes ended because I ended up realising that people can be brainwashed and conditioned into anything, even being a demon, an example would be of burning the whole world for having sex with someone. This is a real intent and individuals of different intents of these kinds trapped in hell are let loose on people who just want to live their own lives and people and their lives are manipulated by such kinds of individuals. It is a setup of only and only negative attention. It's essentially save your own ass kind of setup with genocidal rapists running amok and if you are not privileged the next can be you. This arrangement is cleverly hidden by propaganda and you would read Dainik Jagran and feel everything is fine but issue is that the propaganda is not being able to hold the peddled false reality in its place anymore because of the internet which was important for making new financial systems and panopticons and a ledger of people's lives and of course for harvesting of data.
Not all genocides are active, some are passive and some are passively active. Bengal famine was a passively active genocide of people. There is a misconception that genocides don't happen now and especially in countries that appear stable. They do, it's just that they happen simultaneous to existence, cultural genocides, genocides of families and family cultures. For the most part these genocides are passively active. You live for quite a while and then if you are intelligent you realise that in modern times we are not living in cultures but in a hyperreality. The baffling thing for me to realise was that while the privileged live in a global hyperreality, the unprivileged and especially from third world countries and backward regions of those countries who on the outlook seem to be living in a proper culture are also living in hyperrealities, albeit of a local or regional nature. Life even in a third world country and even in the backward regions of third world countries is not authentic. If we are talking India, past twenty years have seen the dismantling and collapse of highly refined local cultures into mongrel cultures easier to manage and shame. The process had been initiated long back it's just that the people who were born in the early 1900s were still alive and thus carried the cultural authenticity within them. What is culture if not alignment to love and nature, and if you are a 90s kid you know it existed back then and you have seen it deteriorating in real-time since then as the exploitation increased and older generation gradually died. It's not that exploitation and rape were not present earlier, it's just that culture too was present which has been dismantled. The past decade taught me, which I found quite unbelievable for some time, that those who hold power actually want to delete refinement and aesthetics from the local cultures, retaining them just as tokens to show when someone from outside the culture comes and also weaponising local cultural expressions as objects of shame. The cultural genocide is complete by now, all that remains is a hierarchy at the top of which reside individuals with total disconnect to their cultures and roots in the name of cosmopolitanism and this cosmopolitanism requires them to desert their own culture in the name of modernity. Anyway the news is that highly refined local cultures of this land have collpased and what remains is a mongrel hyperreality and now we can all shove pizza slices in our assholes from the pointy side and become the national bird of this country.
There are two approaches to life, simple and complex and it is not really easy to have a simple approach to life as life has a habit of complicating things. The most important thing then comes down to accepting consequences of one's choices which in itself is complex in collapsed socio-political realities because only a responsible man would accept consequences of one's choices and in collpased sociopolitical realities the most responsible person is blamed the most even for the the impunity and mindless actions of others and if you are aware of deeper realities of existence, one more unfortunate dimension arises, lack of autonomy of people over their selves and this arrangement is in place so that selected individuals can live their lives with impunity. In extremely optimised cases of persecution or exploitation people end up having zero percent autonomy, unless they salvage a little through their efforts, and more than hundred percent responsibility and accountability. Still, experience is the teacher and once one is experienced enough and has mapped the terrain of their existence, taking responsibility for one's actions becomes easier. Mindfulness and making one's decision and doing one's job with intention helps. Mindfulness when one is doing something, and mindfulness about the thoughts that are in mind are important in the current sociopolitical climate. A good person takes responsibility for their actions but we live in times when one's actions might not be necessarily theirs and so a good person ends up taking responsibilities of actions that are not even theirs. This is the downside of choosing goodness as a way of life. The concepts of Nietzsche's slave morality and master morality do not apply to a man who is truly good, being good is a way of life for him not because being good would take him anywhere but because he knows that proper flourishing of humankind depends on choosing good over evil. However the practical truth is that evil always wins, one, because it always uses opportunism, hypocrisy, deception and force and domination and use of these tools, which are not tools for the evil but deeply entrenched in them due to inherent weakness, means that they would have to continuously apply these tools and approaches for the lust of power and the lust of power translates to power over lives and bodies of people, right to rape people and wealth and resources. Power is not inherently corrupting, it's just that it attracts the already corrupt or those who are prone to corruption. A good man or woman must know how to simplify things. Hell and heaven don't matter to a man or woman who has lived on their principles.
Is there a foolproof way of living in the nation that we live in? When opportunism and hypocrisy rule and everything is a hustle and an unfair one at that because being able to hustle too is a privilege as most of the people gets their legs broken before they can enter the hustle. I personally have tried everything, minding my own business, which I have been doing since my childhood, focusing on my work literally everything and yet I failed to prevent needless interference in my life which mostly consists of doing my job, caring for my family and consuming current affairs and pop culture. The worst part about my realisations in the past decade is that one can't really know whether what actually rules this nation is the government or not, since what I have felt in the past decade is quite informal and unfortunately rapey, demonic and criminal. I might assume that what I am going through is a hell of my own making, the consequences of my own sins but then only sin that I have committed is jacking off during my college days. There is a phenomenon called snowballing, here is an example, like a hate crime or case of sadistic predation by influential or privileged individuals gets so out of hand, because they made the mistake of judging the individuals they were committing the hate crime on or preying upon wrongly and then since the shit has snowballed and hit the fan it has now to be managed by state machinery, here we see a simple hate crime or recreational predation snowballing into persecution by the state. Unfortunately in the country we live in it's not an abnormal phenomenon. Most people don't reach the level of state persecution at all, their stories end at becoming the victim of leisurely predation or hate crime and that leisurely predation or hate crime is made to be seen as act of God or fate or worse they are victim blamed for their own demise. If there is one thing that I realised in my life is that, at least in the nation we live in, minding your own business and choosing your own corner to do your work quietly is not going to save you from your fate or the “wrath” of God. Unfortunately the wrath of God is dependent on how you look, your physical attributes or whether the way you do things is attractive to God or not. This shit is perception based and I ended up realising that the deep administration of the place I am from, Purvanchal, have the personality profile of Definite Khan from Gangs of Wasseypur, and these Definite Khans have access to the personal lives of intellectuals like professors, artists, engineers and doctors. What would you do when you realise that your God is not Lord Ram but Definite Khan from Gangs of Wasseypur? There is nothing that can be done here. No amount of minding your business and choosing your corner is going to help. Still, one has to survive for their family, and so prioritising is important. Here is what I have got for you. Family, money, your job, your art, and your hobbies and interests in any order you like. Relatives and community are important but they can fuck off because what the deep state of this country does and has been doing is weaponising the relationships with the relatives since the beginning and this weaponisation contributes to most of the drama in this nation. The relationships with others needs to be purely incentive based and transactional in the political reality we are living in. Genuine friendships and bonds are a thing of the past. Unless you are privileged, survival is not an option in this nation. And if you are not privileged you must know that your family legacy, your family history have been sacrificed on the altar of rape that operates from the core of this nation.
You live for long enough and patterns of existence become visible. One sees people working on their MacBooks in Starbucks but if you are alive for long enough in India you know that there is no work important enough that requires disruption of coffee time, especially such an expensive coffee. But then importance is all in the mind and people work at places where environment is feasible enough for them to get ideas. A MGNREGA worker gets that environment from his own body, its homeostasis when the sweat allows him to feel the blowing wind as air-conditioning. I have lived long enough to realise that God in this nation, or if not this nation at least where I am from, is an exploitative entity. I call this entity God because it practically is God and is omniscient and omnipotent and its omniscience and omnipotence falls just a little short of the God I used to believe in would possess. The work of this God, at least where I am from, is to make people dispossessed and then to exploit that dispossession. Preventing people from gathering knowledge, skill, experiences and competence and then punishing them for not having them. When people do not have knowledge, skill, experiences and competence what remains is opportunism and hypocrisy, because competence gained through valid means is humble and that has been the design of competence gained from valid means throughout the history. Competence gained through dedication, hardwork, struggle and suffering lasts and also makes a person humble. Hypocrisy treats itself as an exception it has no option but to do so because very often the ones who are opportunists and hypocrites are also incompetent. As this country, or probably my region, presented itself to me in the 2010s, I realised that in this nation being able to earn a living honestly too is a privilege. When one looks at it, one imagines what kind of individuals would prevent people from gaining their work through honest hardwork? The answer is simple, those who don't know the taste of bread earned through honest hardwork, those who have lived on money earned from brokerage, debt collection, usury and extortion. A person who wants to earn his living through honest means has to jump in the muck of corruption and become a part of the system and so everyone in the system keeps silent because there is dirt on everyone and there is fear of their dirty laundry getting aired in public so the system keeps working, consuming the innocents and hardworking making them bear the brunt of just wanting to exist while writing a make-believe screenplay or making an excel sheet on one's MacBook in an expensive coffee shop remains a very valid form of work, which it is, at least more than the work of making people dispossessed and exploiting that dispossession throughout their lives.
Most people can't get to the place where they end up knowing the real meaning of freedom or whether they are actually free or not. As my personal realisations go, I ended up realising that the freedom and possibility of freedom have been permanently foreclosed. People had as much fun they could have in the 90s and those who failed to have fun even in the 90s can only depend on delusions to have fun. I am grateful that the reality presented itself to me the way it presented itself to me because any other way I would have been tripping on spirituality and theology and would have failed to see the real nature of the world and this country. The real nature of this country and what it rules it is of a rapist who sees your sexual curiousity and desire to be intimate with a person of your choice as a reason to rape you, because these very thing in its eyes demand to be disciplined, demand rape, demand shaming when it is just the sexual urges, animalistic drives, the desire for domination and humiliation of the person in front transforming into act of enforcing discipline. Things have essence, so do emotions, so do actions and so does phenomena. When the base of the emotion is domination and humiliation of others the resulting emotion, action or phenomenon will carry its essence and this very thing is the reason for deterioration of this nation. I have seen despotic tyranny personally, and the bad news is that it can be personalised, customised for a person for what rules this nation like Dr. Evil in Austin Powers creates its mini-mes. Imagine a rickshawala pulled from the streets and transformed into the American interpretation of Hitler. Efficiency in exploitation doesn't require skill if you have the tools to deliver fear. Whole countries can function on variations of desire, lust and fear and I ended up seeing that they actually do. All discussions end when the core of something itself is rape. All of this seems far-fetched for people who are in bubbles of their delusions but the bad news is that once the bubble pops and reality seeps in the place where the bubble was, the absolute bottom line of this nation would become visible and for a person like me, bottom lines matter the most.
Little things matter, but they do not matter as much as one thinks they do. Higher purpose matters but not in the world we live in. What actually matters? Basics. And for other things that actually matter, one has to ask themselves and ensure it is them and only them who is answering. Sociopolitical existence is like fighting a pig, that too a pig that is spawn of Satan. The pig will first drag you in the muck and then try to beat you in your own game because it knows all about your game. One moment you are in your own made up wonderland and the next moment you are in the muck and you look around and there is nothing except muck and then you find yourself getting beaten in a game that you thought was your own. Anyone who has ever felt the walls closing in on them knows the feeling, the only difference is someone has to commit a sin or crime for the walls close in on them and others, the unfortunate ones, just have to exist for the walls to close in on them. The walls can close in so much that it gets difficult to breathe. Little things don't matter that much but they do matter, and in the world we live in they matter more than the higher purpose. Like peeing after holding the pee for long, like sitting in the quilt and drinking tea with the family in winters, like chai and pakoras on a rainy holiday. Little things matter more than most things, in fact they matter the most but in the bigger picture they don't matter as much one thinks they do because there is a background to our lives, a background that is obscured from our view, and yet life itself is composed of little things and little moments. Higher purpose, when the background that is obscured from our view is considered doesn't matter but everyone should have a higher purpose, the most common one, mastery in their art or calling. We are all slaves to the obscured reality, and the God that we grew up believing in seems to be just in our faith and nowhere else. It seems that the God that is in our faith and the God that gave spiders the power to make webs, a venus flytrap the ability to catch a fly, a whale the thick milk to breastfeed their young ones in the vast ocean are different. It makes no difference until one knows who they are, what are their strengths and weaknesses and know their ethical framework and value system. Pigs rely on exploiting people's ethical framework and value system, they rely on weaponising people's conscience against them. The true enlightenment arrives when one realises that little things matter, higher purpose matters. And that they don't matter too but only because the background that is obscured from our view is composed solely of muck.
It's a lot about the mindset you carry at a particular point of time. I wouldn't call myself more of a mindset guy as I find myself more of an essence guy but life teaches you and I ended up realising that mindset and approach matter a lot. In my youth I had a sentimental sort of artistic-poetic bent towards life which I still retain as module after all the practicality that life has thrown at me making me more pragmatic and overriding my idealistic bent though I still retain idealism as a base state. Early youth I used to wallow in my suffering and that is not underplaying my suffering, it was enough to make a grown man off himself but True Detective Season 1 style wallowing in and philosophising one's suffering does little in a setting which is predatory except getting you under the crosshair of predation. Two things must be remembered at all times and they are essential to know, one, that happiness is the base state of a human being and sadness and depression is sociopolitical in nature and two, one must always think positive while knowing that majority of people are in an assembly line of extractive exploitation where they would be extracted and discarded while the whole blame for their suffering would be put on them when it is not the case. So, one must intentionally choose to be happy no matter how much is the sadness or depression, of course it is hard but happiness is a choice, and one must always think positive especially when they get a lot of negative thoughts. Consciously thought positive thoughts neutralise the unconsciously appearing negative thoughts. Life, especially the socio-politico-economic reality, is mostly about mindset, approach and choices one makes. Also, those who have been thoroughly acquainted with the reality of the world know that there is not even a speck of God present in the world yet they must know that your God is as real as your faith and as strong as your faith and He or She empowers you if your truly have faith in Him or Her. The sociopolitical reality we live in is all about money and contacts and that means money and relationships and if you don't have both that means you are a target for predation because you don't have the social immunity. Things are actually this simple. You have to, at all times, be clear about your intent. We live in times when others stories about you can override the truth you know about yourself and so much that you would end up believing the stories others tell about you about yourself than believing in your own truth. Social reality is like deep sea, at surface it looks all calm and serene but in the depth there are predators waiting for people who have no social or financial immunity to make them their prey for reasons no other than sadistic pleasure and in this regard everyone in this country who is not well connected to what actually runs the society is dispossessed and a spiritual orphan. Once one realises that societies are evolved so much that at their base they run on an evolved emotion like hatred things get easier but this hatred is then coupled with base pleasures and instincts and evolved predatory pleasures like sadism and schadenfreude and you get societies which act pious and cultured but their actual engine is hatred, sadism and schadenfreude. Once one becomes aware of the basic truths of society and has enough knowledge of their own self navigating social realities becomes easier though it comes at the cost of naivety and innocence. The whole game is about perspective and perception and one should always have a perspective that is true to themselves and a perception that is positive, not because society is good but for the sake of their own mental and physical health. One can't change their essence but one can change their approach and they can work on their mindset. We live in times where wallowing in one's own misery too is a luxury.