To be or not to be, that is the only question.

" When I look into the mirror, i see two things: what I want to be and what I am not; My chest will never be so huge. My legs are too thin. My nose has an odd shape. I want to be like the man in the Gillette commercials." Any boy today will echo these lines for it is this desire for the hyperreal that instigates any individual to long to a certain space so as to grab the other's attention. Advertisemnts tend to trap us here, promising ae elevated state of existance.
Utility no longer remains the main feature that determines consumption. In fact on produt today is even sold on this lone feature. Every product today brings an image of a particular lifestyle attached with it. Moreover, due to a diverse industry, a consumer is given a wide variety of products (and concequently socio-cultural images) to choose from. This makes the consumer transcend mere necessities of purchase and commit himself to personalise to something beyond it. Choice is thus between the socio-cultural images: whether to belong to them or not. These series of instituted signs constitute society while providing the idividual withan illusiory sense of freedom.
On classifying, we get a diverse range of ad-images: the image of the indifferent but cool student- Virgin mobile, Menthos, Center Fresh; the macho image: Bajaj Pulsar, Axe, Marlboro; the independent woman in Asmi Jewellery, Scooty Pep, Fair & Lovely. The list is never ending. In the contemporary world, indivduals have less control in self realisation and therefore adopt to these images to describe themselves. The 'self' reduces to an object of market dimensions. The image turns back on its creator to control him or her, for objectifying to an image assigns thim or her to a particular place in the overall socio-economic order. Thus the consumer is commodified.
Trudging a foot further, consumers today also have become images themselves. Fiction has become real and real, fiction. I may not be studious but a series of heavy books in my roomguarantee me the image of a bookworm. A tattoo of Che Guevera and not the knowledge of Das Kapital make me a self proclaimed Communist. Carrying my books to college in a Pantaloons packet ascends me higher up the Socio-economic order. We are thus proletarised regardless of class . . . a function of the advertisements around us.

Scribbling a thought.

Early morning . . . Nine o’clock. I boarded the local train for DumDum to meet my friends. We had decided to watch a film, perhaps Jab We Met. College was shut down to mourn a student who had died while being operated for cist. As I stood on the platform for the train to arrive I watched the black smoke let from one of the poor huts by the side of the station, a striking contrast to the fresh air. However, after a while it faded slowly away and mixed easily with the atmosphere.
As I boarded the packed train, I noticed people shouting, quarreling, pushing and singing. All the passengers were huddled into one lump. I strained my head up gasping for breath. To my surprise, I saw a duck looking at us in utter dismay. It was held up high above in a bag. I smiled at myself; little did it know it was being taken for slaughter. Then again, I remember the look on his eyes- a very surprised look-a virgin look of something very similar to him.
It was an epiphany. I gradually realized the look to be of the man animal in today’s world. He is the duck. The duck that is bought by the buthchers (corporates) and put on the high board, stuck by board pins. And as he stands wriggling on the wall, others decide his fate- which part of his body is profitable or rather bankable.
They are those ducks crowded up together in the corporate baskets covered by the nets of advertising that makes the suffering look alluring. They wait in those baskets for ‘clients’ who come and examine and take them to be slaughtered. Our self is butchered to find which the most tasty one is and it is given to the main client while all others wait for the minor parts. The irony is while the birds are caught for the slaughter, the man animal prepares himself all life for this professional slaughter while birds are caught for mans need, man slaughters himself for his own desire, aim, need etc.
I wonder what would happen if one day an epidemic called the man flu breaks out. Governments would grow conscious and ask for the mass slaughter of the man animal. An amount would be sanctioned, in its place, and it would be called ‘security’. Corporate companies would soon be selling their lots to be butchered. If the man animal is killed he would be saved from the routined butchery of the self. However, if the price offered is less, companies would hold them back to save losses. Initially the man animal would think they are preserved but it would actually be a prolongation of their suffering.
There is however no escape for unlike the birds whose butchery of the self results in death, in case of humans, it results in the slow killing of the soul. And so, he is trapped in the suffering that life is. The realization only results in death. Soon the meadows of the little lamb change into Dante’s inferno- where life ends but death does not come. . .