“Of
all tyrannies, a tyranny exercised for the good of its victims may be the most
oppressive. It may be better to live under robber barons than under omnipotent
moral busybodies. The robber baron's cruelty may sometimes sleep, his cupidity
may at some point be satiated; but those who torment us for our own good will
torment us without end for they do so with the approval of their own
conscience.”
- C. S. Lewis
----X----
“So long, and thanks for all the sh*t.” With due apologies to Douglas Adams, those might be the thoughts echoing
through the minds of the lots which are leaving. The lot left behind shall also
be a much relieved lot. They will feel what the black population of the US would have felt at the end of the Civil War. While there is still a Jim Crow-esque existence to be eked out, it would not be worse than the confederacy-come-alive
which had run rampant for the last 3 months.
It was supposed to be “the best
time of the career, if not of the lifetime” for those coming in. They had
surmounted the unsurmountables to get there. All that ensued could have been
avoided, if somebody had realized that these were grown persons, adult men and
women, and not school-kids. Unfortunately, no one did. To use an aeronautical
analogy, the flight of euphoria crashed suddenly into an unforeseen mountain of
despair. “Catch-22” came alive for them. It was realized that between the
release of that book and now, bureaucratic apathy and official stupidity have,
more or less, retained their character and magnitude.
“Shooting skeet
eight hours a month was excellent training for them. It trained them to shoot
skeet.”
– Joseph Heller, Catch 22
– Joseph Heller, Catch 22
So, for the first month, like
Yossarian, they were wondering why the whole system was so hell bent on killing
them. Every weekend, with the certainty reserved for death and taxes, came the
long, tiring and futile trudges across the hills. And then, when mere weekends
seemed insufficient to The Man, they were sentenced to a whole week of the same
treatment. They were the forsaken-est of the forsaken – no one really cared if
they fell down the precipice, got dashed on the flat rocks, or got impaled on
the jagged, rough one, or got eaten by a leopard, or swept away by a torrential
rivulet. Every day was just stretch upon
stretch of punishing ‘green miles’. It totally looked like the end of the line
for them. But then, when one is treated like dirt, one develops the tenacity to
stick like dirt – and so they survived, somehow. How? Ask no questions, hear no
lies. And what did they learn for all their pains? Well, they learnt how to
wander aimlessly and painfully across the hilly countryside – although the
degree of proficiency at the same will always remain in doubt.
----X----
“Now, men, it's no
skin off my behind. But that girl that wants to play the accordion for you
today is old enough to be my mother. This is all voluntary, of course. I'd be
the last colonel in the world to order you to go to that U.S.O. show and have a
good time, but I want every one of you who isn't sick enough to be in hospital
to go to that U.S.O. show right now and have a good time, and that's an
order!"
– Joseph Heller, Catch 22
Well, enjoyment was always mandatory
for them. They sang, and they danced, and they played and ran, and they threw,
and they jumped, and they begged, and they crawled, and they climbed. And they ‘enjoyed’
it all – not enjoying was an option not even on the table. As they were
‘enjoying’ all this, there was an uneasy sense of déjà vu, which often made
those false smiles flicker and betrayed their (the smiles’ and the wearers’)
falsehood. Of course, it was being done to them ‘for their own good’, ‘to make
them prepared to face the world’, which, as green horns, they were pretty much
unequipped to do now. It was being done to ‘groom their personality’, and to
‘mould their characters’. Now didn’t that smell like old bullsh*t being
recycled anew? Where had they heard that before? The same excuses are oft
paraded by the apologists for another similar practice – ragging, which, under
the laws of the land, is a criminal wrong. So what is the similarity between a
criminal offence involving ritual humiliation of school / college freshmen and
‘the best time of one’s career’. Well, off the top of their heads, they
remembered a few points of congruence – both are done by those in positions of power,
to those who are under their power, and the power differential is huge in such
cases – either de jure or de facto. Both are done primarily because they have
been getting done more or less similarly ‘from times immemorial’, and because the
perpetrators of the day were once the victims. Finally, both are justified by
providing similar excuses, as has been discussed above.
----X----
“ "Hey, Aarfy,
did the bombs hit the target?"
"What
target?" Captain Aardvaark, Yossarian's plump, pipe-smoking navigator
would say from the confusion of maps he had created at Yossarian's side at the
nose of the ship. "I don't think we're at the target yet, are we?"
"Yossarian, did
the bombs hit the target?"
"What
bombs?" answered Yossarian, whose only concern had been the flak.
"Oh well,"
McWatt would sing, "what the hell."”
– Joseph Heller, Catch
- 22
What did they finally learn? With
so much to ‘enjoy’, it was pretty easy to be run over flat by the steam roller
of enjoyment. So, well, they learnt to prioritize and economize. The first axe
fell on the things that they enjoyed naturally, without aid of the almighty
shaft – and with that died the natural zeal and zest. And then, they all ‘fell
in line’ – each according to his or her own capabilities and level of
incompetency – set up straight by the almighty shaft. They learnt the following – if not mandatory,
do not do it. If mandatory, do just as much as would suffice. As the famous
advice goes – at first, do nothing…If pushed , run around in circles. And if
cornered, appoint a committee. One could almost see the next generation of
dogged apathy being ‘forged in the furnace of Vulcan’. And thus, in finality,
it just became an exercise in getting it done over with – who cared what one
actually did – like a monotonous, never ending trudge. May be that’s why they
had to do those marathon walks to begin with!
----X----
Vilfredo Pareto has contributed a
lot to the ideas of societal economic welfare, but his most iconic idea was that
social welfare is increased if even a single person can be made better off
without making anyone worse off in the process. What happened in this case
would have really sent Pareto spinning in his grave. Here, on one side, were
the supposedly best minds of the realm (‘supposedly’, because they had not been
‘confirmed’ yet), and on the other side were definitely the best minds of the
realm, in their own era. Yet, this confluence of the crème de la crème managed
to actually make a lot of people much worse off and miserable, without anyone getting
better off in the bargain. With such a glittering gathering, the possibilities
were unimaginably bright – to have wrought misery instead, under conditions so
propitious, is criminal, to say the least. And yet, this has happened since
long, and looks as if it shall continue to happen for long, in open defiance of
logic, in the name of tradition, and in the name of continuity.
----X----
Will they ever complain about it
all? Will they ever come clean? That’s highly improbable. By the end of it all,
half of them might be convinced that Big Brother actually loves them. The other
half would be fooled into thinking that they are convinced that Big Brother
actually loves them. So all of them would be selling rainbow dreams to the next
generation of innocent kids, the same way they were sold those dreams. Well,
the facts would be out, in a manner of speaking, but the feelings would never
come out truly. They would continue to shower encomiums on the whole episode,
and describe it in the most glowing terms. Because, as they say, there are lies,
there are damned lies, and then, there are……….eulogies.
[DISCLAIMER- THIS ARTICLE IS
ABOUT IMAGINARY ENTITIES IN AN IMAGINARY SETTING. THE AUTHOR IS HAVING, AS YOU
MAY HAVE GUESSED IT BY NOW, THE TIME OF HIS FRIGGIN’ LIFE ;) ]
