PUN CHRONICLES 10 - IT’S NOT CRICKET

1904 – Congo

Shiva had lead a most peculiar life. Having travelled widely in Africa, he had seen sights so outlandish, so outrageously beautiful that even his patriotic heart had to accept that this strange land was prettier than his own. After a while, however, even the unimaginable becomes mundane, and Shiva found his heart yearning for the monotony of his home. India, enslaved though it was, still figured in all his fondest dreams. He was not suited to the harshness of this continent.

Shiva used to be an intimidating sight. Though not overly tall, he was as stout as they came, and had immensely broad shoulders and burly arms. However, his recent travels had seen him fall victim to various forms of diseases, and, though he survived them all, he did not make it through unscathed.

He had lost his former stockiness, his body having shrivelled up into a much tinier frame due to weakness. His skin had a jaundiced tone which lent him a slight radiance, but a sickly one. His muscles could no longer bear the strain of the soldier’s life, and he had been allowed to leave the forces, provided he aid the soldiers in other ways, doing odd jobs around the camp. This allowed him some time to himself, and he used it to roam the wildlands and soak in all he could before he set off on his journey back home.

It was on one of these meandering walks that Shiva met the man that would unwittingly change his life. Walking leisurely through the tall grass, Shiva heard the unmistakable sound of a man running at full pelt. The intermittent prayers being offered up in the local dialect and the absolute abandon with which he ran told Shiva that this was a flight for survival.

Moving towards the sound, he intercepted the man, a petrified looking local, and asked him if he could be of any help.

“A spirit!” he gasped, “An evil spirit is come.”

He continued in this vein for many minutes before Shiva could calm him down. From his incoherent mutterings, Shiva gleaned that some beast was on the prowl. There seemed to be a lot more to the tale than that, but it was beyond Shiva’s ability to comprehend the rest.

Armed with his rifle and the confidence of his days as a soldier, Shiva undertook to seek out this beast, if only for the thrill of hunting and the gratitude of the locals. Crawling through the undergrowth, he came upon a clearing within which a little round hut sat, drawing attention to itself by means of the plumes of smoke emanating from it.

A menacing growl reached Shiva’s ears, one of a large cat partaking of its victuals. Crawling sideways to get a better look at it, Shiva espied the lion tearing into a woman’s corpse.

The lion was a majestic specimen, its coat without a blemish, its fangs glistening red. A shudder ran down Shiva’s spine, one that was an admixture of fear and awe. He sat there for who knows how long, contemplating the clash of civilization and the unabashed brutality of nature that the spectacle before him presented. However, as he watched on, Shiva’s eye was caught by a protuberance on the lion’s forehead. At first glance, it looked like the beast possessed a third eye. It’s positioning and otherworldly appearance fell right in line with the many mythologies Shiva had acquainted himself with regarding this very characteristic. It was only on more careful and considered examination that he realized that it was merely a tumour, or an overgrown wart.

The ramblings of the local man now made much more sense to Shiva. The mere appearance of a wild beast in these parts was no anomaly and would not command such fear. That man must have fallen prey to the same sleight-of-mind that had at first attempted to take Shiva in. A supernatural being in the form of a lion with three eyes is a matter that would legitimately warrant widespread panic, especially when the beast set about attacking the population in broad daylight, with nary a care for the consequences.

A cunning plan began to form itself in Shiva’s head. He had scoured the plains of Africa for many a long year searching for something that would break the monotony of his life. He had given up hope of returning to his homeland with anything resembling a fortune that would allow him to live out the rest of his days in a restful vein. But here was providence dropping just such a fortune into his lap.
With just a little prep and some inspired marketing, he could charge people for the experience of witnessing the all-wise, all-seeing, three-eyed-lion that he, Shiva, had risked his life capturing alive.

If he could get this creature back to India, somehow… But there were far too many obstacles in the way for him to be thinking of that just now.

With his adrenaline pumping, Shiva’s thoughts were all action. He fashioned a trap similar to the kind the locals used when they wished to capture a wild beast. The trap was simple, involving a carcass, some primitive, natural tranquilizers and a cage. Within a couple of hours, the three-eyed-lion was unconscious, in the cage, and at Shiva’s mercy.

The next few weeks were spent making arrangements. First, he obtained permission to return to India. He cited health reasons that were all too well-known to his superiors. He then set about bribing the various officials that he would encounter if he wished to take the beast with him.

Being a lowly soldier, he did not have much in the way of wealth, but he drained most of what he had put away, knowing that if this gamble paid off, the influx of wealth would far surpass his wildest dreams.

The rest of his savings went into arranging for the maintenance of the lion for the long trip ahead. It would not do to have a malnourished, mangy lion when the whole point was to dupe the public into thinking this was a supernatural beast. The beast had to be fed, cleaned and kept in luxury so that, on arrival, it still possessed the aura that had sent the local man scurrying in terror.

The terror was key. Fear kept people at a safe distance. Far enough away that they would not see through the makeup and the ruse.

At long last, Shiva found himself approaching the shores of his country. The very air seemed to wrap itself around him, welcoming him into his new life of comfort and luxury. No longer did his eyes catch the misery of the common man, trampled underfoot as the British Empire wreaked its havoc. No longer did he see in his neighbour’s eyes the vestiges of dreams crushed by colonial rule. Shiva had eyes only for the opulence of princes and the magnificence of the many castles. He snorted in contempt at those who accepted their lowly state and stagnated while they were ruled by the white man. He would show them how one breaks free from chains.

With these thoughts and others akin to these flowing swiftly and nobly through his head, he set foot on his beloved nation’s soil and breathed a lungful of air.

It was to be his last breath as a free man.

Immediately, he was accosted by a group of guards. A large, white man dressed impeccably in a military outfit watched on as Shiva struggled to free himself from their grasp. When they succeeded in finally subduing him, he approached Shiva, somehow seeming aloof while obviously orchestrating the entire episode.

“What is the meaning of this ruckus?” he asked, “Why are you resisting arrest?”

“What have I done, sahib?” Shiva asked, nearly in tears at this point.

“You have been charged with dereliction of military duty, illegal smuggling of animals, bribing members of the army, falsifying reasons to leave military service and a whole bunch of other crimes of which you shall be duly notified in court.”

Shiva’s ears turned red, his breath came in short bursts and his face drained of all its colour as he saw his visions of vulgar excesses turn to dust before his very eyes. Half blinded by the tears now openly streaming down his cheeks, he turned to the imperious white man one last time.

In a broken voice, he asked,

“And what will become of my beast?”

The white man smiled and said, simply,

“The lion belongs to the Empire.”

The Internet as a Saviour of the Absurd

We have had innumerable chances. We have lived through monarchies, oligarchies, communism and capitalism. We have built empires and watched them crumble, raised conquerers to the status of Gods and then stabbed them in the back, crucified our saviours and deified our tyrants. Every age has seen its follies reveal themselves just when the collective human hubris was at its peak. And yet, every age that followed would inevitably follow the same path, making the same errors, albeit under new guises. Our only consistent system of ruling has been hypocrisy.

It is hard, when reading history, to not see societies evolve and devolve in cycles. It is hard to ignore the inevitable feeling that all we read will come to pass again. Or at least, it used to be hard. What has changed my mind today? Just one Goliath of a phenomenon — The internet.

Never before has so varied a mass of populace been privy to such a vast treasure trove of information. Never before has the news of the world been at one’s fingertips, no longer discriminating against you based on your financial or social position. Of course, humans still being a flawed species, it does not prevent us from misusing this power: The internet is famous for being a cesspool of hate and vindictive bigotry. However, even from the fumes of this depravity, an unexpected solace arises.

Absurdism.

In earlier times, it was the unknown that gave us hope. We did not know enough about the flaws inherent in whatever system we chose to believe in, whether political or religious, and thus had no reason to douse the flames of our fervour. This fervent belief kept absurdism at bay and limited it to a fringe movement at best. We worked with gusto and lived with an eye to the future, because we believed in a future. We believed in our ability to build a wonderful world with inexhaustible resources and overall satiety. We birthed children by the dozen, hoping that their acumen would be of some use to this utopia-to-be. This was an age where one was taught that, with the right attitude and the right effort, anything was within reach. Many a kid set forth into this world with the fire of imagination burning bright. And, before the internet took over our world, many of those kids died without ever knowing what killed their dreams. Perhaps many blamed themselves for their shortcomings, perhaps some of them were right. But always there was an ever-present, malevolent force at work.

But now, you would be hard pressed to find idealism in such abundance. There are vestiges of it still, for sure. But these are mere fragments, mere spectres. Amongst the younger generation at least, absurdism rules. And the internet was the battering ram that broke through the fortress of our sheltered existence and introduced us to its invading horde.

The cardinal rule revealed to us in this age of free flow of information (somewhat), is that every endeavour, no matter how nobly undertaken, and no matter how pure the intentions, contains within itself its own bane. And its collapse is not probable, but inevitable. A system even now is judged by how long it sustained itself before self-destructing, which tells us that we already knew better than to expect an eternal solution. Perhaps it is fitting that everything has an expiry date. Perhaps it is an unwritten rule that our very universe follows, and therefore, everything in it as well.
But full acceptance of this fact had never been so wilfully embraced as it has by this generation.

Now, to switch things around, let us take a look at the world through the lens of the much- maligned millennial. As one grows, one learns both by observing and by means of access to events worldwide that, essentially, everything has gone to shit. There is no room for anyone, no food for most, no distribution of wealth. We have endangered our existence by totally destroying our environmental well-being, by running through resources way faster than they can replenish themselves and by a blatant disregard for any form of a pragmatist reigning in of our splurges. Children are expected to study much more than any previous generation ever did, but are also expected to start working much earlier, and compete for worse positions. We are the most over-qualified generation to be unemployed and no, it cannot all be put down to millennial incompetence.

We no longer live in a world where people believe that they can turn to the government for help. At best, they hope to survive what the government puts them through. Corporations are the only escape from abject poverty to most, but they are soul-sucking machines that turn people into grey-lifeless blobs.

So, a child growing up now has the choice between being a penniless individual, or a decently well-off slave. Not exactly salivating prospects, either of them.

And so, what can we expect of this child who, wherever he looks, sees only rivers of shit through which he must wade, without the solace of a reward on the other side? Why do we feign surprise at his unwillingness to break his back working for the future of our planet? Why do we shudder when he displays pride in his dark humour and cynicism? What else have we left him?

Nothing.

So far, we examined the destructive element of the internet. We had a glimpse at the crippling effect it had on an entire generation by giving them a too unadulterated view of the world they live in. A microscope powerful enough, pointed in any direction, will reveal only chaos.

But here, the internet comes into its own. When all is nonsensical, when all is absurd, then none may challenge the supremacy of the internet. A casual browse-through of even the most mainstream of social networking sites will reveal to anyone, no matter how ignorant, the identity of our prophet: Memes.

Originally, the word was, at least in appearance, much more profound in meaning. But, and fittingly so, the internet adopted it, corrupted it, deformed it, and created from it a phenomenon that cannot be controlled.

The internet offered anonymity, the meme offered ease of access and creation, and the collective frustration of the new generation did the rest.

When nothing makes sense, then there tend not to be too many subjects that are sacred. And nowhere has this rule been followed more religiously (oh, the irony) than on the internet. There have been incessant attempts to control the content on the internet, to ban certain words, sites, images or forms of jokes. But the internet blew every attempt at impeding it out of the water, and effortlessly at that. Its power is only now being recognised, but by now the seething, sprawling, flourishing underbelly that is the human network on the internet has grown so immense that it is all one can do to even partially regulate it.

And now this power lies in the hands of every man, woman or child, anywhere on earth. A meme allows one, from one’s basement, to poke fun at the institutions or people that were formerly irreproachable. Sarcasm and dark humour have revealed themselves as the primary weapons of internet humour, and they are terrifying weapons when aptly used. There is no comments section on any platform on the internet that does not, before long, deteriorate into a pun-fest, or a reference war or simply a concoction of absurd, layered, internet inside-jokes. It takes extraordinary strength of will for a regular user of the internet to still take things too seriously. And most of us do not bother to make that effort, we do not see the point. The meteoric rise of irreverence and the complete abandonment of ideals that were held aloft for millennia before us is the only logical consequence of this phenomenon.

On the internet, you cannot be too pedantic, but you also daren’t be inaccurate. And even if you, by some miracle, say something completely accurate, you must also be interesting and witty, or else you were better off having spent your time elsewhere. The same comment, whether true or false, could incite polar opposite reactions depending on whether you gauged the underlying mood of the conversation correctly or incorrectly.

Whole communities of strangers will band together with no prior planning, just to ridicule a person who trespassed any one of the countless unwritten internet rules. And once you have been handed over to the internet for purposes of ridicule, then there is no hope of escape. Some persons have become so adept at satirising artists or celebrities that they have outshone their victims and become celebrities in their own right.

It is a vicious, unforgiving and, above all, nonsensical alternate world that we live and flourish in.

Digging under the surface a bit, it may appear that the internet and its brand of humour is a coping mechanism, the only means of expression left to a generation that has been strangled before it had a chance to breathe. A futile show of resilience and resistance in the face of overwhelming woe.

We choose, however to see it another way.

If, through despair and hopelessness, despite itself, we can create this beautiful global culture, this magnificent middle finger to the world; this untamed, unbridled, unmanageable deluge that makes a mockery of any attempt at sensibility… If that is to be our legacy, then let us embrace it and ensure that, at least in destruction of meaning, none were ever our match.

Let the absurd be the only true modern art.