The Place Of Nonsense

Life, today, is a matter of such criminal tragedy, that India has become a satirical canvas expanding with each passing day.

- Gautam Bhatia

Are we living today in a time when clarity and focus have been traded for the half-baked, the incomplete and the incoherent? An ever-present defeat and despair lends a shrill stagnant air to daily life. The morning news, the TV refrains, the fearful headlines, the debates and rebuttals and arguments, every day begins in a myopic hallucination. What is real, what is fake, what is a mirage... is clouded into trivial tales told in conflict. Daily transactions in self-importance confound and displace. The debates, the heckling, the fasts, the stand-offs, the blame, the walk-outs, the filibuster, the disruptions, the bunds, the padyatras, the back-biting, the in-fighting, the mud-slinging, the accusations, the charges and counter-charges, the claims, the defence and the self-defence, the electioneering, the brawls and fisticuffs, the verbal and physical jousts, the rivalries and retaliations, rage and outrage – every enactment of a selected exaggerated reality is condensed into small timeframes. Look around. Political debate claims grandiose intentions, but stirs no one, serves no purpose… the idea is to keep the voice at high decibels so no one hears, no one shouts louder, no one relents. Words flow without a pause. Same faces appear regularly on Live debates, often the same person simultaneously on three channels. Voices raised to fever pitch incoherence accuse and indict each other in a restless battle of wits, with no end. The quickest method is vendetta. Rot passes judgement on rot; rot explains the existence of rot; rot becomes the rot. Nothing goes nowhere.