Wage slave: Adj. – “Term used to describe someone who feels it is their moral, ethical and professional responsibility to sacrifice personal time, family time and overall living life itself as an attempt to justify the monthly remuneration an organization pays him/her for delivering twice the amount of services that same monthly remuneration truly justifies”

Welcome to the life of a wage slave. I’m one of those billions of faceless people who belong to the lower strata of economy. We don’t have the luxury of living life on our own terms because the way the world functions, if we want to live life our own terms, we first have to spend considerable amount of our life living it on terms which are dictated by other stakeholders in our lives like society, family, friends, relatives and trade! By the time this considerable period of time is over, we’re either diabetic or heart patients and have no energy/willingness/enthusiasm for life, let alone live it on our own terms. All we want to do is curl up in a rocking chair in a house for which we spent the prime years of youth and middle age paying mortgages/rent.

Our lives are spent helping a handful of millionaires world over become richer so they can re-invest that wealth into machines, cement, glass, weapons and acquire more of the wage slaves like us and finally evolve into billionaires. Our existence is conducive and significant to them to make this transition.

Our lives are also spent helping governments world over to become pathetically corrupt because we are so time strapped that we're willing to let go of small to medium portions of our hard earned wages to avoid the bureaucracy and red tapism that is involved in availing the pettiest of state facilities like getting a passport which allows us the right to go to places we anyway don’t have the time to go to or getting government telephone connections which we never intend to use except for the purpose of using the monthly bill while providing a proof of residence when we apply for that useless passport I mentioned before.

Our lives are also important to justify the existence of something as impractical as religion. Please note, I don’t say existence of God. I say existence of religion. Religion was devised for lesser mortals, in other words, commoners like you and me who don’t have the time to stop for a moment, ponder over mysteries like “why am I here?” or observe, analyze, evaluate and rationalize our beliefs. If we weren't so engrossed in delivering the humongous amount of output we wage slaves are made to deliver, don’t you think we would have more leisure to rationally distinguish right from wrong without someone having the need to serve us all these diktats on a platter.

We wage slaves are also the basis on which the whole structure of society was created. A bunch of workaholics whose only responsibility is to use their mind, body and soul to provide for his/her family, pay off debts, survive and defeat competition from other wage slaves etc. are bound to end up with several emotional and mental frustrations at some point of time. If it wasn’t for the clearly defined rules and regulations of society, wouldn’t we wage slaves be running loose and wild all over the place, creating chaos, organizing ourselves into sizeable groups capable of overthrowing the masters we all work for? Society and its long list of dos and don'ts is what keeps our world in order and keeps you and me in our places. Notice how these rules of society become insignificant the moment any one of us wage slaves manages to crawl out of the well in which wage slaves are stuffed and begins to wade through the pristine pools in which the rich and elite float through life.

And every time someone sees the futility of it all from amongst us, we call him/her terrible names like escapist, idealist, careless, foolish, impractical, and eccentric. We brand him as the black sheep who was too lazy to live up to the hard work that is a part of being a work slave. He’s an instant failure in our eyes. But the fact is such a person is called all these names and many more not because he’s a failure, but because he had the guts to do what we all want to do, but don’t have the courage to do. We live by the book. Even though before we go to sleep every night, we think of doing exactly the same thing this ‘loser’ dared to do.

But we never do it. Why? Because we have succumbed to our destiny of being a wage slave. Like Dobby from the Harry Potter series, we’re so used to being slaves, the very thought of being liberated individuals scares the shit out of us.

No one is born a wage slave. At least not since the end of bonded labor. It’s a choice each one of us has made for ourselves. And every day, we look for a million reasons to justify this choice. We’re too weak to be anything else but a wage slave. And the biggest irony is that most of the wage slaves aren’t choosing to be wage slaves because there are needs to be fulfilled. Most of us are choosing to be a wage slave because we can’t feed our insatiable appetite for fulfilment of wants and desires unless we become one. 

Me included. 

Pen(t)ing it Out

Long time no blog. Discipline is not exactly one of my core strengths has been established long time back. But then writing is not something that comes to me every day. Its triggered only when something happens and the weight of that something is so big, that I feel the need to pen(t) it out.

So, what is it that’s hit me so bad that I feel the urge to write today? It’s the subtle realization that there is no bigger crime in the world than theft. Every other crime is related to it. When you lie, you steal a person’s right to the truth. When you cheat on someone, you steal a person’s right to honesty. When you kill someone, you obviously steal a life. When you try to manipulate someone’s feelings, you steal their peace of mind. It all boils down to theft. Yes I know…this is no original thought. I picked it up from “The Kite Runner”. But I just realized, the guy is right. The thought is so deep and of late I've been feeling a very deep connection to it.

The problem is…..someone has been stealing from me since a very long time. And now, I’m not liking it one bit. As a matter of fact, what started as minor irritation has turned into a major strong dislike for this certain someone. Ignorance they say is the best way to hurt someone without doing anything violent/ harmful/ malicious; but here’s the deal….this certain someone is so self-obsessed, it views being ignored as a sign of me having laid my weapons down in some form of surrender. What an idiot!

OK. Here are some questions I want you to think about before I spew the venom inside me.

1.       How do you feel about people who cite religious scriptures for the silliest of things and then do things which would perhaps bruise even the conscience of someone as stone-hearted as Hitler?

2.       How do you feel about people who think the whole world has nothing better to do but hatch conspiracies against them?

3.       How do you feel about people who condemn all things declared taboo by society, but secretly either wish they could do each one of them or actually go and do them?

4.       How do you feel about people who have a “chori…upar se seena jori” attitude. For the Hindi illiterate, literally translated it means someone who steals something and knows they've done something wrong and yet when someone questions him/ her, vindicates himself/herself with a lot of aggression.

5.       Lastly how do you feel about people who think that all the problems in the world, right from princess Diana's death to Manmohan Singh’s irritating silence is somehow related to them and is reason enough for them to crib about how miserable their lives are?

I don’t know about you, but there is only one emotion I feel about such a person. Very strong pity. This person needs to slow down. Probably get a shot of self-respect from the closest vaccination center and needs to undergo a major conscience transplant surgery as soon as possible. Her/his condition is way too critical. And though this is not a contagious disease, it is one which could suck out all the positive energy from anything or anyone who comes in contact with the patient. Of late, I've had the displeasure of being at a very disturbing and harmful proximity to one such patient, and the always cheerful, bubbly Arnimaal has been reduced to a venom spewing b***h from hell J

Someone told me, why do you let this person impact you to this extent that even the sight of him/ her makes your blood boil? Why do you expect from people? Well, here’s the answer. I generally don’t bother keeping expectations from people because I know how pathetic I myself am when it comes to living up to someone’s expectations if it doesn't suit me. However, I don’t create any illusions about my inability to live up to unreasonable expectations. I’m generally very clear in communicating my limitations and setting the right expectations. Being the naive idealist that I am, I expect the same from others, especially if they claim to be my “close and true” friends. When that doesn't happen, I snap! Simple.

But a person who says one thing and then goes and does something that’s completely contradictory to what they claim, I do get disappointed which leads to me getting angry and eventually distancing myself from the source of disappointment completely. I don’t think I’m too wrong in feeling disappointed. It’s healthy to have expectations from a person, especially the ones which are set by the person himself/herself.

If you can’t live up to the expectations that you yourself systematically set up in someone else’s mind, then as I said before, go get a self-respect vaccine and a conscience replacement surgery done as soon as possible. I know the certain someone I am writing about will never read this piece because he/she doesn't have the medium to access my blog, but I wish as hell that his/ her “well-wishers” share this with him/her. It would save me the displeasure of speaking to him/ her and would maybe even give him/ her the clarity that I ignore/ avoid him/her not because I've surrendered my weapons or something like that…..but that I think it is beneath me to even bother looking at such a person.

May “Allah” bestow some sense upon this one for the sake of all those who have to deal with him/ her on a daily and more permanent basis!