The Fourth Wall Game

A couple of weeks back I jumped about the bus home on the Saturday night. As soon as I climbed up the steps and was halfway in, I was greeted through the sight of an elderly woman standing in the aisle from the median pole. She was holding it with one hand and the backrest of the seat with the other. Nobody offered her a seat, not really the young woman who kept typing away on her behalf mobile phone. Standing just inside a few meters in the scene, I thought to myself: she need to have abandoned her own. Nope, she wouldn’t make it happen. Appallingly, she took no notice of the elderly woman who slowly stepped around the aisle and stood right alongside her seat.

The blue-toothed dumbphone user who seemed to me forever inundated by digital messages, simply acted as though she is non-existent and he or she didn’t much care, and wouldn’t even search for from her phone to find out, to think, to realize… to reside in her life in order to care.

That selfish act of hers, according to me, was hopeless, odd and sad beyond belief. And of course, another one beside her in the window seat, a female, pretended to become seriously checking her prized possession: her cellular phone didn’t manage to care much in regards to the goings-on in the world around her either. Her face bowed forward dully aglow with diodic white light emitting from her mobile device placed for my child lap. What’s more, she too acted up like her hard-to-ignore phone is her lifeblood and she or he possibly could die with out them if she didn’t check her messages (which she did all the time of her bus ride). Oblivious for the frail elderly woman standing near her, she won’t lookup from her mobile but moved her head from side to side as if matching the dance steps on the music of some new-age sizzling funk. (She damn well understands how to groove a lot better than Disha Patani or Beyoncé Knowles or Baba Ramdev. She can even answer that pathetic kiki challenge. It’s funny that such dance moves could be excellent for mass going number 2!) And the aged woman continued to hold vigil for a seat while I kept thinking to myself that at least she might have breathed easy and rested her legs somewhat if she gets a seat to take a seat, which seemed impossible given each of the goings-on that particular has to deal with in today’s public buses. What a tragedy.

The trains and bus was jam-packed with hordes of people as they are frequently in our country. But no one relinquished their seat for the elderly woman who was visibly struggling to balance her frail weight inside bone-rattling hell-raising RTC bus. This speaks a rancid lot about our so-called ‘modern times’ we live in if you ask me.

What this above story of mine illustrates the reality is that the growing public apathy towards our seniors in a crowded bus is not just abusive but additionally ill-mannered that many commuters turn a blind eye towards their basic rights. Seats earmarked for Senior Citizens aren’t vacated. If you think that this kind of thing doesn’t happen anymore laptop or computer used to become once, perish prospect immediately. Get on to a public transport bus to have it firsthand. It happens all the time. Elderly persons are treated as second-class citizens. They certainly aren’t getting the type of respect they merit. The bus drivers yell at them to hustle up their steps and acquire inside quickly and when inside public transit conductor shouts at them to pay for up. Almost nobody has patience with the elderly. You obviously don’t go around, not on a bus, can you? You may have well-maintained lambigaadis (big luxury cars!) and ultra-modern do chakkas (two-wheeler bikes!) for the luxury commute, in case you travel in a much-abused local state transport bus chock-full while using awful population, you’d know how people react or don’t react for that matter towards the proceedings inside public places. Some people have the ability to look like they give an impression of three-week-old underpants, sweaty and full with self-importance, while some others are just helpless, hapless and insensitive to the goings-on facing them. If you ask me for the free opinion, I don’t hesitate one bit to state that humanity is going around the loo. You don’t have to even flush it; it’s going to go around the back hole alone! Make of it what you will, but I am getting angst-ridden about somethings happening around me – just like a normal do-gooder person can be in solidarity to fellow do-gooders who feel the same as I do. But do-gooders are a rare breed. We can’t lay everything on the feet from the common street lingo: “That’s how a world works!” and lose focus on about it. At the probability of painting everyone using a single brush, I’d still claim that we have slowly descended ourselves into as being a morally bankrupt society, even beyond bankrupt sometimes. While cows, goats, and monkeys within our country get reverential treatment, individuals get lynched, tortured, mutilated through the devious socially unfit hate mongers that belongs to them ilk. It’s not the taxes or the money that kill civilizations, but communal unwillingness to complete good deeds does. Don’t miss to incorporate Global Warming or Climate Change to that particular woeful rundown of mankind’s bloody betrayals and his awesome gross infamies.

After all, you have one life to call home, don’t we? So much for your kind of todays lifestyles we lead, specially the new millennial kind! Looks like todays lifestyles is not everyone’s cup of tea, mine neither, but sometimes we afford to lower our basic sense of moral standards and harp about “That’s the way the world works!” and escape? For this reason alone, personally speaking, todays lifestyles (not contemporary society) sucks. BOOYAHH!!!

I have often wondered if folks are getting worse within the allegedly ‘modern world’ we live in. Indeed, I do lament the way in which we live in the 21st century. It appears as if we live inside Dark Ages – (Jurassic age? Because the term Jurassic could be the latest thing nowadays! But hey! Not the film one wherein those Dinos acceptably find out to eat everything that moves and dump an enormous bombshell of poop and puke that doesn’t. Not their fault, it’s a call of nature. I was just delineating their evolutionary tantrum, safely keeping out your shimmering exotic fare of petrified Dino-droppings and leaving out suggesting how amazingly big a pile was that!) – and not inside supposedly modern world you (not I) millennial Generation Y (mine was thankfully gen X, status: bygone, but those days are still missed) sing fuzzy praises to each day of the glum, apps-controlled paralyzed life.

The World Is In Eclipse

Tell me, how come everyone so pissed off currently? Trump, Kim, Brexit, Isis, Doklam, and Rakhine are just a handful of those deadly affairs which make me wince in peevish sympathy and drop an expletive or two for the purpose is happening around us. You ask why sympathy? Because I am a helpless common man and I pity my personal breed which I think is at likelihood of losing sight of its main purpose, which is being HUMAN first.

The world is at eclipse. The dangerous Dumbledores of the world high are, oh God, too much these power-hungry hustlers: it’s no surprise that, their soul-culling tweets trump up a miasmic front-page spotlight for their own reasons and continually dictate deadly injunctions for everyone to fall in keeping with their malevolent designs or else… yourself as you know it can be most certainly doomed. All this don’t produce a future to dream of. However, which is a sordid tale I want to write about some other time if I’m alive. Trust me; it’s beyond the point where it is not possible to save lots of the world from going along the drains or going the exhaust pipe, as they say. Mankind’s folly: global warming is certainly going to claim the world anyway. One day or any other Nature’s fury is going to unleash the conveyor belt of punishment were so foolishly itching to deserve. If not, we anyway have these Dumbledores up in arms to snuff the Earth out from its orbit. Living inside modern world is akin to humankind’s dilemma to get caught between the cliff along with the whirlpool, very difficult way out to remedy this curse.

Forget about going for the inhabitable Mars where warning signs of probable alien life in lakes and valleys really are a dime twelve, or Jupiter or another vapid dustblown space rock hanging out their dirty linen for all of us to take the bait, Earth may be the one and only game reserve of co-existing animals, marauding humans, and birds we now have been granted with the Gods. Thank God, we’ve got no other home and thank God there will probably not be another. We’re all in this together; on our third rock in the Sun. We’ve to reside here and kick the bucket here. Tell me Elon Musk, are you getting visions of interstellar travel and that aspirational jazz that comes with it? Do you fancy shaking hands using the aliens, the small green-gooed extraterrestrials that could fancy checking out your ‘spacex’ gigs? Go home stupid. It’s never gonna happen. On second thought, the only concession I am happy to give you is to your electric vehicle (EV) your ‘Teslaphiles’ will complete manufacturing. That’s going to get something optimistically good within the race in order to save our planet from your harmful impacts of tons and tons of carbon emissions. Thank you for the “giant cybernetic collective” to generate zero-pollution vehicles. Sounds great to the environment. But interstellar travel? Forget it, man. It’s never planning to work. Now embark on, go back home.

Let me get my head around the topic accessible first which I admit is much more complicated than I thought it could be. But allow me this small transgression to write a short reflective account as I have a depressing allegory of recent times to narrate. Please don’t blame me crazy; you understand how the modern world works: passing double meaning comments masquerading as jokes which can be expected to be taken lightly rather than seriously regardless of whether they seem ridiculously stupid, being critically judgmental (now, this is the disease common among the majority of us) and ‘like’ it or otherwise not the invasion of omnipresent social websites are but merely a few from the pain vanillas to lament about within this so-called todays lifestyles of yours and mine. However, I grant that I know fairly little with the way the entire world works politically and economically, but I’m glad what you are doing just great being a clever know-all monster of sorts, right Mr. Trump? How about you Mr. Kim? Besides, Mr. Kim, it seems that the Dumbledores with the Trumpian world will make you and your country rich (Trump Tower-size if you’d prefer), but only in case you give up your weapons of mass destruction (WMDs) and lose your weight! Get trendy, Mr. Kim. And what is always that gelled hairsty… ? Oh let alone. Good for you. You did finished . right by pledging to denuclearize. Good riddance of the funny-looking penile rockets of yours, they just don’t belong to humankind. God bless you, Kim ji. You’ve fallen in line. You was required to, I understand. Your country’s soil has decided to get enriched with Trump Towers and all sorts of that deck of matchboxes will scrape heaven of your island nation, as promised by that nasty presidential counterfeiter of America, the hot-headed Don whose official house (not his tower) is white. Meanwhile, Earth is saved again, for now at the very least. Sigh.

My Last-Ditch Effort at Living a Modern Life

Yet, I have other pebbles to pick from your beach – my last-ditch effort at living life without studying the revolting “start-from-the-scratch” scenarios again, whether it really is possible living life and never have to correct any mistakes, it’ll really be of no great help. Correcting one’s previously committed mistakes often tantamount to one’s, I believe, willingness to accomplish good for oneself and move ahead; you get to be morally upright, and stuff like that works within the world in which you have to sometimes rub shoulders with fundamentally-immoral people. This is one of the reasons why living life king size has been a subject of dislike or anathema in my experience as I feel I am not intended to reside in my life the way most middle-class individuals are aspiring (or perspiring) to – that is certainly to earn money and then lose it at the shopping malls, buying stuff that is certainly really not required. That’s a lots of impulse buying spree there. Have money, will splurge syndrome. And mind you I don’t have problems with the kind of life people live because I don’t need to become racked with humbug anxiety that could bring my Waterloo closer than I want it to. For all I know, of my pickled brain predilections and predicaments, they live their lives superior to I can ever wish to.

Most people who have a very little bit of money buy big houses, spacious flats in gated communities, flashy phones, big cars they don’t really really need. I think people suffer from your ill effects of ‘rock-bottom’ self-esteem and emotional maturity, a sort of personality deficit that requires a high-touch of perpetual glare from their own community members or from your general society at large, massaging their inflated egos inside process. According in my experience, necessities such as most obvious explanations why they want to exhibit how successful they’re in life in addition to their newly acquired wealth to get anything others can’t. Roaming around in swishy cars with swishier names and swishiest number plates make sure they are feel that they should be used seriously and so look unabashedly successful while they are at it. This feels like envy talking above his pay grade. Does it truly? I am not envious of anybody’s wealth or success, how come I be? All that I ever crave for is my loved ones and gharerbhojon(home-cooked food) with dal bhaat (lentils soup and rice) with macher jhol (fish curry) on the menu, and visit temples and lightweight incense sticks for the presiding deity’s darshon.

Looking at his flashy new phone, I once pried a society’s self-certified homdachomdas(big shot figures, most likely from the predatory Harvey Weinstein stock) who can be considered nothing short of the inveterate materialistic-consumerist junkie: Is it really necessary to spend extravagantly by using an expensive phone costing up to Rs. 80,000? The answer sounded being a lame excuse, “Oh!! I just love gadgets so you know what, this is” flashing his latest mobile acquisition if you ask me “absolute NIRVANA”. I pitied him. I just hope our paths never cross again.

I find their mentality being basically corrupt to never want to have simply a small house or perhaps an apartment or travel in a trains and buses whenever required. In today’s advertising-driven world, they see others affording material luxuries in order that they too want to do likewise. They too want to have it all and flaunt it and impress others within their community. That’s not normal based on my left-leaning style of living; it’s abnormal. People come track of excuses including, “I love gadgets, you know”; “I need a big house, mansion-like” to justify the ‘power’ they derive from other amassing of wealth as well as the misguided feeling of a high societal position they hanker after. Yeah, the king really wants to roam great halls and search down in the arched balconies! How bullying is that.

Even their character traits like newfound accent, their walking style and the body language, their spoken language, etc and so forth changes, irrespective with the fact that nearly every one of them may have had started out from humble and modest origins. Forgetting their humble past, they hurtle towards an upcoming that can never be sustainable from the standpoint of planet earth Earth’s lifespan inside the day and age of rising temperatures and habitat loss. I am not certainly one of judging people but I still find it shameful really. People buy swanky blah, blah, blah, stuff to attract attention like they want others to think about them more important than they were previously unaccustomed to and respect them for what they have ‘achieved’. Nikes on his or her feet and Rolexx at their wrists – what bloody pride!

Well, what I mean to convey is that there are no ‘WMDs’ in my well being to protect. (Poor Mr. Kim used to have a different form of WMDs but he’d wisely destroyed them approximately it seems). My ‘WMDs’ are carbon emissions kind I need to find approaches to put a stop to. However, I try to guide a plain vanilla form of life and yet on the end with the day I happen to contribute for the soaring temperatures of the planet’s fragile ecosystems which I do not ever like to. To me, the natural world is more essential than enjoying manmade luxuries that come with an expiry date. Modern every day life is unsustainable. But the fact is there’re no immediate ‘WMDs’ in playing to seriously take into consideration. The empathy towards our global biodiversity and climate stability must be a necessary motivator for making the world a better place to reside in. Ignoramuses like Mr. Trump and Mr. Kim should need to know.

The Left-Socialist kind of life is also what I mean, not the consumption-heavy globalized Free-Market rape capitalism type that plunders our beautiful blue planet. The latter part of our own economic success story sucks for sure. In the man-made made-to-size globalized world, king size todays modern life is anathema to me. The high, coarse standards of lifestyle that everyone has set ourselves to get accustomed to is the harbinger of global carbon emissions and rising temperatures contributing to greenhouse gases and crumbling ice shelves. These dangerous inconvenient truths are certain to combust our planet to your fiery annihilation. Like a bheegibilli (a cat scared wet with fear) I am fearful of these unforgiving phenomena crippling our way of life over a delicate planet we call home, our only home. Certainly, we’ll be really so stupid when we didn’t do anything about climate change already.

What I mean to convey is we require to determine a way to radically remake the worldwide economy that’ll prevent global temperatures from rising. It is possible to do that. Cutting our lifestyle needs by half and manipulating the population of humans are two acts of faith that can be believed in as new beginnings for greater common good. Otherwise, there’d be nothing left for us to complete business with. Now I am not partial to lecturing but that’s the truth, and the truth is always inconvenient to deal with. Global warming is definitely an inconvenient truth for those who think it isn’t really. So much for the moral high horses-bourses: Wall Street, BSE, Nikkei and also other stock market WMDs perpetuating Buy Sell, Buy Sell catcalls of plunder. All of these global stock trading game fucks come in bed with greenhouse gas-guzzling counterparts with the global warming deniers. Oh, fuck! What did I just say? Oh my god! Oh my god! So you want to lynch me now? Lynch me in the event you can. But the facts is always stranger than fiction, mind you. Nevertheless, it’s my last-ditch effort at living a modern life of today. Afterward, I may be attending God’s good humour party uninvited. I don’t know… I stop trying.

Living king size life directly contributes to an incorrigible climate change that we cannot roll back: not even to the point when, post liberalization of our own economy, we gradually did start to turn ourselves in to a narrow-minded bunch of your addictive reptile-brained consumerist mall-hopping shopping rats, some form of angry bird-loving misfits, and junk food spendthrifts. (There are always exceptions. Not all of us sane ones are becoming wide-eyed in-your-face individuals). Today, we buy over we need; we eat over we digest. Ultimately, pretty much everything sacrilegious practice is going to sound the gong of death knell for beautiful blue planet as you may know it. Earth time’s up. (God forbid not). If mankind doesn’t mend their often intentional blunders, Gods likely will act by their Godly codex to send within their WMDs within the form of Global Warming, Climate Change, Sea Rise, Temperature Rise, you name it. Now, man up and take care of it. Let’s collectively mend our ways. We should, must, in any other case we are all dead. Am I yakking a lot of about a holier-than-thou attitude that I appear to have possessed? I don’t think so. But climate change is an obscene reality today. We should have set our Earth’s climate on the point of no return nonetheless it should not stop us from doing something to turn the tables on climate change. My personal ranting about it here might not seem irrelevant you aren’t noteworthy as to get very important a distress call but still, we must urgently think to avoid wasting our mother Earth from becoming yet another dead chunk of rock inside the solar system. Think over it.

I think PUBLIC APATHY IS AN AILMENT OF THE SO-CALLED MODERN SOCIETY TODAY or why would anyone in his/her healthy mind, body and soul be unable to offer the humble aged passenger a seat to sit on? As I did not get a seat myself, I just stood there guiltily shifting my weight from foot to another, getting really concerned, unable to move further in the aisle to try to ask someone to have up and let her sit. I was tortured by regret and struggling to fathom why nobody’s conscience is getting pricked. Where have their good morals gone? They’ve gone with all the wind: of fake news, social networking trolls, hate speech and an abusive crucifix of hashtags all tossed and lovingly tousled with a self-gratifying tourney with a land of twisted egos and self-important algorithms that changes colours out-performing a Chameleon.

I know I’d be heckled, rebuked and shouted at for daring to ask someone to acquire up and permit the woman sit, so I didn’t dare. I was stuck inside mute crowd of ‘modern’ people oblivious to the situation seniors woman found herself in, for no fault of hers. How everyone has shunned their morals forever, and they talk about getting jobs, wanting a pleasant new girlfriend and bragging about human rights like it is their baap ka maal(their father’s property!). In a conjuring devil’s phraseology, these kinds of individuals run the likelihood of getting labelled as motherless fuckers nevertheless they won’t be ashamed. Even if they certainly fall compared to that level of culpable human indignity, they do not think they’re going to ever be ashamed of themselves; rather they’ll use it as a batch of honour on their chest – rhino thick-skinned hides they lead their life in, being unmindful and uncaring of the old woman’s plight.

Modern Life Is Rubbish. It Sucks.

There are a number of issues in daily life that in some manner compel that you start from scratch all over again to turn them back from worse. That’ll be a golden chance of you if this kind of opportunity comes by. To remedy some mistakes of one’s life is an alternative ballgame, probably a task best suited to procrastination. While there are some others you don’t get a chance to resurrect your earlier ills, you will still feel the none-the-wiser concerning the ones you are bound to make. They (life’s issues) are extremely far gone to the inaccessible Past for you to be able to create amends. I confess I have had through the years my share of ups and downs (I contact them issues), good and bad times, rights and wrongs, in terms of ‘issues’ were concerned. If truth be told frankly, there has been quite a few I had had to tackle but failed miserably. That’s why I don’t think about them anymore. But they do be capable of worry me from time to time.

Modern life sucks if it has got to. It will you should, but whose humanity could it be anyway? Yes, ours. We are collectively together within it: inside Earth’s primordial soup. Pardon my using such a language in the event you will; old habits die hard. Without an iota of doubt, inside the ‘issues’ department modern life of today definitely sucks, fairly and squarely. It’s a Baadurer choshajibon! – A Bat’s suck life.

They say “post 9/11”, life in the supposedly ‘changed world’ will continue to slipshod and promises to maintain at it unabated. There’s no hope of resurrection. Only the ‘start-from-scratch-all-over-again’ decree prevails in case you fall for it. Modern life’s now modern death. On the one hand, to reside one’s life within an increasingly shrinking post-truth arena of modernity, specially the terse drivel behind “You’re either with us or against us!”, “Advanced versus the 3rd world,” and “Us versus them” intimidation sucks, and about the other death could be long-drawn but never quick. Dying multiple deaths could be the new world order. It’s Kali Yuga; the nemesis of humankind is imminent. You don’t must pack up, you may be sent packing! If it’s the final of morality then it is the end of humanity too.

While I understand that there will always be “issues” but… who cares? Get up and smell coffee. Modern every day life is such an unforgiving fancy mistress (or perhaps some cases a courtesan! To each his or her own.). Either you receive hitched or get restless with out a girlfriend. Either way, you’re doomed! What type of attitude (positive?) is going to be adequately OK to handle this preposterous thing called modern life of today? If you take notice you’ll know how the basic inquiry still remains as it’s: Will you be a casino game to conform to its intrigues and succumb to it, or agitate against it? Think about it. You could have an answer fot it question. I never did. Never will. Unless, Mr. Kim retires from managing his country, Mr. Trump backs off… to his Tower, Islamic State (Isis) expunged from future history books along with other such horrible disasters. Not to mention Iran, Iraq, Syria and the list proceeds crooning an irredeemable tune of death and destruction.

Modern life is bound to get rubbish and I am acting just as if I had never been kissed! Regardless of whether you prefer it or otherwise, you continue to be living the so-called modern life of today and already kissing it goodbye for those know. As things stand in my well being now, I can’t rest assured feeling that I am faring better than the most. Not by any stretch with the imagination. That’s not how I must feel about myself? That’s not normal for me. Why? Faring a lot better than everyone isn’t my concept of living playing normally along with judiciously, wisely even. I can’t fare much better than others. Not my cup of joe I hold to adopt a sip from. I am not a fool to declare that I cannot learn better at all: I can but in my own sweet egoistical way, on my personal terms. That sounds better in my experience. Yes, Dude, I don’t generally know better about todays modern life, others do, for the most part, I think. What I am mortally scared shit of is to ‘start-from-scratch-all-over-again’ or “start-over-once-more” or returning to square one (add GST to that, amen!); it gets my goose not cooked but overcooked for my taste. My brain works!

If there’s a boon granted to me to reside in my life all over again, I’d dare to produce more mistakes, take more chances, take fewer things seriously, ride more merry-go-rounds, fall in love, be sillier than I have been this trip, eat more ice creams plus much more biryani, pick more daisies… but none that would contribute to climate change or climate change. Thank you very much because of this one wild and precious life. Let me not go amiss from your actual topic were discussing here. Old habits die hard indeed. A little more reading so you are done once and for all.

End Story

Morally bankrupt people opine the modern world can be a harsh place to live in, so bear with it. Maybe considered one of my friend’s ‘retractable claw’ theory with his fantastic eternal bachelorhood plans is one method to deal using the modern world. With no-one to care for my friend, I’m afraid as days turn into months and months into years, his every day life is bound to have lonelier and lonelier in a very world that sounds increasingly bankrupt of morality currently. But again, one man’s theory could possibly be another man’s fury, in like manner each his or her own way of life. Yet, surviving the modern world is not any less than a miracle to my opinion.

The poor old woman in the bus is certainly one such depressing case which, I think, may be termed as an aberration of general moral bankruptcy for the part of some bus passengers who never cared two hoots about offering a seat for her to sit down down. Holding the overhead post and leaning wearily against a median shaft, she had to maintain standing for nearly 10 kilometres, good three-quarters of the hour all of the way for the north with the city.

When riding on the bus reached my stop, I felt a sigh of relief when I suddenly noticed that this young smartphone-wielding lass who all throughout the bus ride kept typing away on her behalf phone vacated her seat, and that’s when the poor old woman who needed to stand for nearly 10 kilometres took her chance to take a seat down. I am sure she have to have thanked profusely not too carefree, unconcerned and immature lass but her merciful God for that much-needed relief inside the form of a seat.

We can’t lay everything on the feet of the regular road dialect: “That will be the manner by which the entire world works!” and forget about it as though nothing ever happened. Not really wanting to paint everybody which has a single brush, I’d state that we have gradually slid ourselves into just as one ethically bankrupt society, even past bankrupt.