Orphic Exposure

            "A thinking man is a depraved animal" -Rousseau You know, people like to think they’re in control. Like their choices mean something. Like there’s a logic to it all, some grand design, a purpose. But if you really dig down—strip away all the niceties and illusions we’ve wrapped ourselves in—you find it’s not control. It’s just the illusion of it. We’re passengers on a ride that doesn’t care what we want. See, we all got what I call a Life Trap. Well, sometimes, I also do think that human consciousness is a tragedy, but that’s a story for another time, maybe. (And I am one of the few cursed with some) So, I’ve been thinking a lot about time. Time’s not linear, not the way we like to think it is. We build our days around the idea of moving forward—past, present, future (If you ever watch Interstellar, or Tenet, you'd have an idea of what I mean here). But that’s just how we make sense of it, like drawing lines in the dirt. Really, it’s all happeni...

A Post-modern Feminist Demonstration Cruising through the day, I stumbled upon a rusty graffiti around South Delhi which said “Hum Pinjra tod ke aaye hain” (We came out by breaking the cage). Not knowing what it was, my curiosity made me stop listening to songs and google what it was about (I remember listening to “Crazy Little Thing Called Love” by Queen at the time. It would have been really funny if it was “I Want To Break Free” instead). And there it goes, I found another social issue, maybe political (Who knows really!), that happened a decade ago, and I had no clue about it. Fundamentally, Pinjra Tod was a feminist movement in 2015 which challenged the unnecessary impositions on students, purely based on gender, which majorly curbed any female to step out of her hostel after 8 pm. Yes, 8 pm. Well, however noble the intentions of this movement were, some activists left it into something which caused discrimination on another aspect, which is caste. Some were later charged due to...