A modern day idiot

Gregor Samsa is too large a name for our purposes, so we’ll just call him Mr K. Mr K is broadly considered an idiot, but, let’s not immediately put too much faith in his public perception and let’s instead use our own critical faculties to see what he is all about. But.. we must not also completely discard the idea, because there cannot be smoke without some fire underneath, am I right? As Mr K would himself say, Mark of an educated mind to be able to entertain a thought without accepting it? Now let’s not deviate ourselves from our subject to unnecessary discussions about “Oh! But that was Aristotle” “Why did you attribute it to Mr K?”. To the naysayers, all I have to say is- if Mr K told me he said this himself first, I’d just accept that he said it first. After all, even the inquiries of attribution have to stop somewhere, right? Who knows if Aristotle himself was quoting someone else? Who knows if it were Mr K himself that Aristotle was quoting? We don’t know enough- that’s it. So, let’s move ahead. But why is he considered an idiot? After all, it is also widely known that he is a well read man! What is this duality and from whence does this ensue? It all changed on that fateful day.

At the city square (not really a city square, there are no city squares in cities where he comes from, mostly just patches of land unclaimed by shops, but we have to call it something specific, right) , there are about 25 people in the circle- all visibly younger than him. There are 15 placards and one small bullhorn. The placards and the megaphone are changing hands and mouths. There are about 100 people surrounding the originally mentioned circle of 25. These 100 have nothing to do with the 25 other than the amusement of some idiots protesting in the street about inconceivable things. People are generally like that- unconcerned. One would think that in the age of market-driven shrinkflation of the off-the-shelf democracy, people would have more empathy towards protestors, but we live in the world we live in. Among the idiots, there are two journalism students who have joined the ex-students who still live around the college campus because they don’t yet have jobs and it is sensible to continue to pay the old rent in the shared accommodation and keep promising the landlord that they’ll leave soon rather than trying to find a new one far from the campus where the realities of life might start biting into the sweet sweet cake of existence. Others are friends and families (mostly Facebook families) who are here sponsored by spiritual urges of bonding with a bigger group of people and bodily urges of mating with people from suitable inclinations. Among the friends, is our protagonist who is driven by yet to establish motivations.

Mr K is a man out of his time. In another time, he could have very well been a mill worker- condemned to anonymous and arduous labour day-in day-out until his body would have given up; and then, God knows what would have happened. He could have gotten ill because of the lack of nutrients in his maize-heavy diet of a lifetime, or, tuberculosis because of long exposures cotton dust, or, kicked out of his house by his progeny- who knows! One doesn’t really read too much about retired mill workers to build an image these days. But he is not in that time. He is in the age, where, in his ripe youth, he is subjected to the comfort of working limited hours and timely paychecks (although it’s not really cheques he gets, but some terms just outlive their literalness). For the sake of anonymity and in attempt of a little bit of homogenization, let’s skip the details of what he actually does also when and how. In the time that he is forced to spend with himself instead of breaking his back in a mill, he spends his time in the pursuit of the most sacred of all social duties- accumulating information, spreading wisdom and spreading the information that he has accumulated wisdom. Only the last of this can I verifiably tell you is true- because the occurrence of the three prior need insights and tools beyond my own capabilities.

If you ask a layman, he is a person of average height, average build, average looks and average abilities (when it comes to mundane and unimportant things like academia, sports, chores, romance- anything). He is so similar to his surroundings that it would be painfully difficult for a sketch artist to draw him. Although you must agree with me that if he hijacked a plane, everyone will bloody well remember his face, possibly even the count of hair in his thin beard. What I meant to say therefore is that he would be hard for a sketch artist to draw in relation to an average crime. To which you might ask, why is a sketch artist involved at all for an average crime, especially when the success rate of sketch artists in crime investigations can be as low as 5%. To which I would say- stop it! I know you know what I mean. Let’s move on. This state of averageness looms over his existence like a bane. He, like all learned men of all times, has an itch- the itch to stand out. Even people like Grigori Perelman and Nicholas Boyle- who appear too avoidant of standing out- if you categorize as he does- are just trying to stand out from standing out- potato potahto! Naturally, Mr K also has to stand out. And he chooses to stand out as a learned man. He embodies the characters of a learned man to varying degrees of success- intellectual arrogance, dismissiveness, pedantry, unwarranted annoyance and a severe lack of common sense (which let’s just say comes more readily to him than other things). In a job interview once, someone said hi to him in his native language and he got carried away. He spent 10 minutes first correcting the interviewer’s spelling and then explaining the origins of the phrase. Another interviewer, who was visibly annoyed, had to intervene and interrupt his monologue somewhat impolitely. Of course he was found unsuitable and he went on to Reddit to write a large post about how he couldn’t care less and how anyway he wouldn’t want to work in the company of such bigoted people. His post got 300 likes and 12 shares. He took a screenshot at 250 and 10 and shared it on his Instagram later. Although, he considers Instagram inferior and in his own words, it is such a distraction, once you start watching something, it is full of reels related to the same thing. And then you have to force the app to change the subject by deliberately searching for another thing and watching those reels for at least 30-40 minutes. Useless distraction!

Mr K has an opinion on things- on almost everything- which is still a subset of what he wants to have an opinion on- absolutely everything. He has opinions on religion, polity, science, women, anthropology- almost everything. And as goes with the demands of the age, his strongest opinions are on the most controversial things. Just last week, he got into a loud discussion with someone about the merits of colonialism almost unilaterally. The other participant, out of sheer compulsion of indulgence presented one or two questionably framed arguments of her own. Obviously, she was no match for the intellect and the ability of citation of her date and thus received a meta lecture about the importance of civilization pushed into the throat of unwilling recipients. The pupil, after having consumed the daily bread, spent the rest of the evening with near-visible disingenuousness, called a taxi, reached home, shouted into a pillow and thanked her maker for not letting the outburst take place in the restaurant and then cursed the same deity for the barrage of idiots she was sifting through to find an average partner. He, on the other hand, oblivious of any other happenings of the day reached home quite content with the victory, dreamt up a number of future scenarios in his head and then slept like a baby.

Back to the fateful day and place, where the protest is taking place with cheap placards and the bhopu and protesters with arguably even cheaper motivations. Slogans are being shout out in the cold winter. The crowd is gathering. You might ask why I have not yet told you what the protest is about. And I will ask you this in turn- why does it matter? As we have established already, Mr K would become part of about anything if it is guaranteed that he’d be seen as he wants to be seen. For all I know, he can be protesting about the lack of fat in dairy products or the abundance of it. If he sets his mind to something and really pretends to believe in it, he can believe it. Part of this is the virtue of being brought up in a religious environment, isn’t it? You just close your eyes and say a hymn or a prayer and the reality just becomes what you want it to become. Who cares what the hymn means or if the story of partition of sea is a metaphorical or a literal one? Religion is all about the process- the process of believing- the process of submitting oneself to the idea- the process of joining something bigger than yourself; and in our case, it is the process of choosing to join a group of adventurous youths in their act of protesting with placards and a bullhorn. The bullhorn keeps changing hands and different creative slogans are being raised and then mechanically repeated or harmonized by others. There is a mixed reaction of the surroundings to the event. Some shopkeepers are getting excited looking at the crowd and join its outer ring to take a look at what the hell is this now, while others which mainly are the temporary shop owners and tea sellers anticipate something and start wrapping up the day early.

Bullhorn comes to one of the family members (let’s call her X) , she goes “bla bla bla” and the others go “bla bla bla bla”. She repeats herself and the others themselves. It changes hands to another and then to another till it comes to Mr Y who has his eyes on Miss X and in an attempt to impress her, shouts “bla di bla bla” (which is a double meaning slogan about the policemen who have just joined the outer layer of this congregation and I don’t want to translate because I don’t want to meet the fate of one of my own fictional characters). The protestors are elated and they chant “bla di bla bla”. Everyone laughs minus of course the policemen who are trying to spot the leader of the crew and are slowly drifting towards the protesters. After five rounds of the inventive mating call, Mr X passes the bullhorn to Mr K whose eyes as he raises his hand to receive the ornament meet the eyes of a policeman. Mr X turns back and elopes while Mr K trying to decide which hand to hold the horn in and which hand to pull its trigger with hears some sounds of argument near him. One of his female fellow expeditionaries starts shouting at the policeman uncle in English while the policeman says something along the line of “this bastard with bhopu called me fill-unsavoury-abuse-here”.

Before he can make sense of what is happening, a solid lathi of about two inches in diameter finds itself on the cozy back of Mr K’s average body. His posterior does an instinctive jump and his body bends like an arc backwards due to some evolutionary response system he is yet to study about. A shriek finds its way out of the inside of its chest through his mouth- a sound that he would be surprised to recognize as his own under normal circumstances. He feels very quick transitions of temperature of the skin on his back- first very cold, then very warm and then it starts burning. His hands start making motions that can be best described as trying to itch the exact center of your back where you can’t reach and he runs towards something- anything. While his legs are trying the best to get him the fuck out of this mess, he receives another similar bang from behind on the important juncture where the legs start. He is running away from the scene doing the same itch-dance while some of his co-participants take out their phones to record the brutal police violence on protestors- actually just one protestor, because the sipahi had the good sense to stop as quickly as he spotted the first camera lens and changed his tune to asking why are you guys making noise whether they had taken permission to protest (the Kafkaesque irony of which our protestor guild was just discovering).

As fate would have it, our hero who has developed a fever because of the beatings of the last day, wakes up to find his phone full of messages of sympathy and subject of, as it seems, a viral video trend. #itch-dance. People have superimposed his character’s dramatic exit over the sound of a beat cop and the tune of an old bollywood song- a crass song that describes an vulgar mix-up of one’s husband and brother-in-law. He is unexplainably angry- perhaps because of the aforementioned mischaracterization of the story behind the now popular dance step, or perhaps because he wanted a different song-who knows!

I don’t know, you tell me, is he an idiot?