Straws in the wind

people, who draw fat salaries but cannot write a correct sentence. I know people who are religious but don't make an honest living. There are people, who look distinguished, but deep down inside rotten like anything. The world is full of contradictions, but nobody likes to talk about it.

I like to talk about it and people think I am critical. I like to talk in spades, white as white and black as black. But others don't see what I see. They live in a monochrome world, where it is a jaded boredom of gray. They don't believe in light and shadow. Everything is twilight for them.

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Who is right here and who is wrong? Man is a creature of the darkness, conceived in it at birth and consigned to it in death. But he spends his life in the light of the world like a subway train crawling out on the surface. I want to open my eyes and look out in the sunlight. Others want to close their eyes and believe they are still passing through the tunnel.

In Samuel Butler's novel Erewhon it is said that illness is a crime, the more serious the illness the heavier the sentence. Nehru once told his daughter Indira that he considered illness as a sin. The same Nehru later changed his mind and claimed that speaking about disease and illness should be forbidden by law, except in case of necessity. Even enlightened minds waver. Why blame the ordinary ones?

My hypothesis may strike you as odd, but nevertheless I would urge you to think. Man carries the darkness from the womb, which stays with him until he reaches the tomb. Hence, most men live in ignorance, because they never learn anything. The rest of the people range from half-literate to genius, the level of enlightenment varying in degrees. People are like pots and pans. They come in different shapes and sizes to hold different quantities of the same substance.

I like to talk about it. Because I know people who are brown-nosed, people who would do anything to get favours from powerful people. I know respectable people who do it, and I question if they are respectable at all. People get upset if I ask that question. They don't like it.

I like to talk about pretentious people, because they claim to be who they are not. These are the people, who are desperate, use false certificates, spend money, imitate others and have fluid personalities. They are the chameleons amongst us, believing in nothing but their own warped conviction that life is what fancy makes of it. They work hard to create the perception that the bottle is as good as the label.

Then come the portentous folks, people who do everything to show that they are so important. These are people, who toot their own horns, brag about pedigree, talk about money, children, friends and relatives. These people are like showboats, everything about them is clapped in ostentation. Their purpose in life, like spectator sports, is vindicated in applause.

The rare species are the perfunctory men, those who lack enthusiasm but go through life as a routine job. They grow up to marry, marry to have children, have children to leave behind descendants and leave behind descendants to die in peace. These are people who do the groceries in the morning, go to work after that, return home in the afternoon, take a nap, read newspapers, watch TV, grow fat, gather cholesterol, suffer from hypertension and then, one day, drop dead. These are the people who live and die in the humdrum of their existence.

But I mostly talk about other folks, the pathological people, who live under compulsions. They must lie, cheat, swagger, conspire, contradict and do other aberrations. These people are psychosomatic, their mind and body dogged by each other. They must deal, they must steal, they must conceal and they must kill.

All these people don't like if I talk about them. They don't like to hear about them as much as a drunk in the morning does not want to hear about the night before. So I can't tell a politician that he is callous, a minister that he is corrupt, a bureaucrat that he is conspicuous, an intellectual that he is concu-piscible, a businessman that he is contumacious.

People get upset with me. They like to be praised, they like to be worshipped, from low to high, inverse of waterfall, from follower to leader, leader to financier, financier to kingmaker, priest to power, power to superpower. I like to talk about condescending people in the ascendancy of power, people who stoop low in order to go up in life. It beats me how they give away their essential dignity for recognition, advancement, and monetary gains and then having to cope with its shame.

Mikhail Lermontov, a Russian poet, described that of two close friends one is always the slave of another. Mankind has struggled for centuries to resolve that dilemma between friends, between communities, societies and countries. People have always tried to subjugate people in monarchies, autocracies, even in democracies. Oscar Wilde taunted that democracy meant simply the bludgeoning of the people by the people for the people.

I talk about this new slavery, and it upsets people. They submit to the supremacy of other people, many to some, some to few, and then few to one, showing allegiance, obedience, servility, yessing to yes, naysaying to no. I talk about the rungs of the ladder, lower rung bound in servitude to the higher one, the equality of men ridiculed in this hierarchy, where every man puts the chain around his own feet and chooses his own master.

In the Russian society of the Middle Ages, feudal lords regularly exchanged slaves for animals, one human being for one horse or one dog. The Europeans and Americans captured men, women and children in Africa and sold them as slaves in their own markets.

People owned people in perpetuity, their lives, bodies, talents, spouses, children and dignity; people owned people line, hook and sink. Masters could do anything with their slaves, even take their lives without any accountability. In the Roman days, many slaves were gladiators, forced to fight and die in the arenas for the pleasure of the Roman citizens. Slavery goes back a long way in time.

The Florentine statesman and political philosopher Niccolo Machiavelli cautioned against the well-worn proverb: "He who builds on the people builds on mud." People build on people, and it has been the way of the world. Nobody likes if I talk about it. It makes them upset.

Civilizations rise and fall because they are built on people, hence built on mud. Slavery persists in human condition, either in body or in mind. Flattery, toadyism, servility, fawning, obsequiousness, sycophancy, these are many words with a single meaning. Infer from straws in the wind. Human spirit can soar in the sky or dip in the mud depending on what it does.

Right now it is rolling in the mud. In all its sophistication, it is the most unsophisticated thing. It is not loyalty, and it is not respect. It is the crass behaviour of a slave who has accepted his fate. If you want to know let me tell you the difference. Loyalty and respect are calls of duty for courageous people. Slavery is for the coward, weak, meek and greedy.

Touché! I suppose nobody is upset with me.

Mohammad Badrul Ahsan is a banker.