EK MAHAAN LAKSH [ ONE BIG AMBITION] [IT BEGAN WITH YOU ROHITH]

I try to stay away from writing sentimental writings. What good is that actually? In fact, I believe false relatability of stupid sadness or say feeling of stupid nihilism, however profound philosophically your pain is, it must be kept within you. I believe this for two reasons, namely.

1. The sanctity of your sorrow, don't you think needs to be preserved. There is something transcendentally sublime in a manner a person falls into his lower self, or say, sadness. There is something so precious that may be saying it out loud destroys the whole purity of your sadness. Tolstoy, in his famous book Anna Karenina, has written this wonderful line, paraphrasing I am, "Happiness belongs to the commons, while sadness must be a very personal thing!". 

Today's mental health discourse is kept at a much sacrosanct position that anyone saying something counter to it is casually labelled as unaware about mental health. It is becoming progressively difficult to create a better mental health discourse than we already have. Don't you think this mental health discourse is status quoist. It is as if, there is some mysterious dimension where mental health issues arise. They take birth due to our material conditions. So, instead of doing something about the material conditions, we keep on solving individual problems. But I assert, Individual level problems are symptoms of a deeper socio-economic disease of the society. 

Sharing personal low point or personal daily sadnesses has become such a fetish of today's youth. I here, for once, want to stand with traditional ideology. Fight it, your battles are not special. 

2. Who actually cares if someone is feeling low? honestly, now whenever I feel low, even then I don't care. Why to care? What especially dangerous can happen which has not happened to people elsewhere in this world? 

Now that I completely derailed the topic, let us come back. Today, I want to share something personal. But I will do it strategically in a philosophical manner. To be in company with my beloved Immanuel Kant's "Public use of reason". What is that? in reductionist terms, when you use reason to justify your own selfishness or someone else's selfishness in favor of say family, friends or even the closest selves, that is private use of reason and Kant denounces it. Public use of reason is when your voice and your reason give voice to a public welfare, a collective good, even if it means your own loss, your friend's loss, your family's loss, etc. So, let's begin. 

I think sometimes, and mind you, it is better than thinking always. I think about my personal predicament. How pertinent is my thought to make an environment of mass level socio-economic change. I, at times, doubt myself if I have it some create such a mass movement. Honestly, maybe I do not have. Maybe I do not deserve to be a mass leader any time soon. But, to put it in a Hegelian reversal, do my people deserve socio-economic change? Yes, they do! 

Who do I call my people? I will give you the most contradictory answer possible. I will not give the naive universalist answer, "Every human being is my people and so on!", NO, anyone but all. My people are precisely those whom I never even meet on daily basis. The people whose socio-economic positions in society are so far from me. They are women, Dalits, Adivasis, People will lower economic backgrounds, Queer people, and yes, new to the list, people with mental disabilities. And I found a very interesting thing. It is an observation. It will amaze you how disconnected people are from there socio-economic position in comparison to the grand scheme of things. People, and here I am talking about, students my age, my friends or otherwise. I have heard them speaking bizarre beyond reality statements about tribals and Dalits and women and what not. And these are learned people we are talking about. UPSC aspirants, people who will become babus tomorrow. I am also preparing for this examination. This made me realize, that the present discourse which is in the form of the syllabus of these exams, do not make you aware of the realest of scenes of Indian society. Seeing and meeting people individually when they bring to you their socio-economic identity is when the magic happens. I see this mass delusion and hysteria when Upper caste sawarna people talk about the injustice they are bearing because of lower castes and the flawed reservation schemes and all. I, in times of my daily reflections, think how ill-educated and hence non-sensitive we are making the future of tomorrow. A concern of public welfare should have been the core of human sensibility. Isn't it that modern mental health discourse has made it so self-centric. I say, who is really happy in this world? No one precisely. But, this brooding, this narcissistic lingering to personal problems makes us so selfish and hence a perfect bait to the neo-liberal content economy. I do not wish to live like this. My sensibility should rationally be allocated to the marginalized and the needy. Not a self-serving gluttony of emotions that I see prevailing.

 I remember my ancestors, my ancestors of social justice, Phule, Ambedkar, Periyar. Dare I say that I will include in the list, Ram Manohar Lohia and other socialists. Nehru, to some extent. I remember my dearest comrade Chandrashekhar prasad who was shot from a point-blank range in his village in Siwan, Bihar. I remember my comrade, Bhagat. I remember comrades who died for a cause. Because, what else would you do? Is the daily ego-fights even worth it? Is the race to superiority even worth it? Is it worth more than the satisfaction that the society I live in is a Samata-mulak Samaaj. 

I sometimes think that like my comrades, including Rohith Vemula, is my destiny also to be killed or committing suicide because of the forces that prevail today, where no direction of social justice seems plausible in near future. You might think that how does it affect you? Why do you bother? To which I reply, "Why doesn't it bother you enough?"

I will definitely not commit suicide. I am too privileged as compared to Rohith. Sorry, Rohith, we failed you as a society. Sorry, you had to die. I do not claim to be a Mother Teresa or a Gandhi to be. But I surely think it is my contingency, a sort of my meaning that I have to do something in this regard. 

I feel terribly alone sometimes. In this anti-establishment war, I find no friend with no bourgeois intentions. Javed Akhtar once said, how can we like an anti-capitalist movie today when we openly dream of narcissistic enjoyments of wealth and how one day, we will all become Slumdog millionaires of our dreams. I say, who has told Piyush Mishra to be a leftist as an adult? No one. Today, he criticizes communism as saying, it ruined him. Who ruined him? Why will communism ruin him? He ruined himself. He put all the past stakes at risk and all those lifelong struggles of modernity and emancipation at stake. Who told you to sentimentally linger to this ideology and destroy your life. Did communists make you drink alcohol or be an alcoholic? NO, they did not. People in this world, developed one emancipation program, to end the oppression of man over man, human over human. That is mocked the most. Why? Why not they dare to question the establishment of capitalism? Because the critique will demand solutions and they do not want to spend resources to find the solution. It is so easy to critique an emancipatory program because it is so open to failure. Yes, of course it failed in 20th century. But is not today's situation exactly where we will need to stop our development fetish in wake of ecological crises. 

I will keep working in this direction. I consider it as a "Mahaan Laksh", and I will not shy to dedicate my life to it. Other than that, all forms of existence, make a family, breed like rabbits, cry on frivolous personal issues, and then die inconclusive like an old newspaper full of fake news, is all bourgeois existence, I despise it.