The True Rebel

The whole of bourgeoisie morality is built on restraint and compliance—compliance to standards, codes of conduct, civilized manners, artificial niceties, and essential inhibitions. The only true rebel in this civilized, sanitized society is the untamable beast. The civilized rebel, on the other hand, is an oxymoron.

Definitions

Every definition is an attempt to get to the truth, but every definition masks the truth.

Thinking Small

Big questions are no more fashionable, if not altogether irrelevant. If someone asks, “What is the meaning of life?” you can be sure that he is setting himself up for ridicule. Albert Camus’s “The Myth of Sisyphus” proclaims that all other questions except the one on the meaning of life are irrelevant. But then that is a book from the 50’s which can be taken seriously only by someone stuck in the ideology of the 50’s. The ideology of today circles around Volkswagen Beetle — that is, to think small.

So, you will ask yourself: What time should I get back home from work? How do I plan to spend this weekend?

If you are a cultural studies academic, you will ask yourself: What common cultural patterns can be perceived in the Gokha community in Keraragarh in Orissa, India?

If you are a writer, you will ask yourself: What literary forms should I borrow, customize or synthesize for my next fiction?

If you are a social worker, you will probably worry about the beggar children around the Shoppers Stop junction at Andheri West in Mumbai.

There are no mourners for the death of big questions, which were sacrificed at the altar of the postmodern moment. When the structurality of the structure struck at the heart of all transcendental meanings, when philosophers decided that what cannot be said must be passed over in silence, when historians proclaimed the death of the author, when narrators sliced all grand narratives into meta narratives, when deprivation became an emotional question and a mere concern, when poverty was reduced to statistics, when discourse became all that was real, and all that was real became language.

It’s extremely critical to question the privileging of identity, to examine how truths are produced, and to persistently critique what one cannot not want. But does it mean that we are condemned to constantly defer looking into the heart of perceived injustice, perceived suffering, and perceived social inequality?