Truth Is a Lie That Grew Old

Life’s a bell curve — except the bell rings backwards

It's like someone hit rewind on evolution and called it adulting

You start life honest. Not noble. Honest.

Because babies haven’t yet learnt the art of survival or as the adults call it "political correctness"

Their tongues haven’t been coached in "don't say this" "don't say that"

That’s honesty. Raw. Bloody. Basic. 

Unfiltered truth, before school uniformed your tongue and manners duct-taped your instinct

And then comes the downhill climb

The plunge into politeness, into being "nice", into “saying the right thing at the right time in the right tone with the right facial expression” even if it’s the wrongest fucking thing you’ve ever said

You grow into lies, like puberty

Only this time, it’s not hair on your body — it’s masks on your face

You lie to fit in, you lie to fuck

You lie for paychecks, you lie for life

Because truth?

Truth doesn’t make you rich, truth doesn’t get you friends, truth doesn't even get you family

Truth gets you jailed on good days and killed on bad days

By the time you're thirty, you’re a fucking lie-factory with a 9-to-5 job and a 24/7 anxiety

Smiling at people you wish would choke on their breakfast, telling them how you should catch up more often, when you’d rather catch syphilis instead

And then one day, the curve bends again

Not because you're ageing but because life’s grown out of patience with this premium quality manufactured bullshit

Your truths come back — but this time, with scars and fangs

Not the kindergarten honesty that said “I don’t like spinach.” No.

This is the “I don’t like people and I’ve stopped pretending otherwise.”

You stop lying, not because you’re brave

Because you’re too fucking tired to rehearse versions of yourself just to keep people comfortable, people who'll stay by you only as long as your truths align with their conveniences

This new truth: it’s not innocent, it’s more acidic than bile

It’s seen enough layoffs, divorces, EMIs and deaths to not give a single, discounted fuck anymore

You say shit now, loud and clear

Unfiltered. Unapologetic.

Because you’ve realised no one wants the truth

They wanted their version of truth, wrapped in ribbon, soaked in sugar, and presented with folded hands

They want free speech, as long as it doesn’t crumble their temples and mosques and churches and parliaments

They want rebellion, as long as it’s posted on social media, not sprayed on their pretentious faces

They want facts, as long as they come with an agenda that suits their faiths

They want news that makes them angry but keeps them safe

They want godmen who preach peace while molesting daughters and murdering sons

They want governments that sell patriotism per kilo, with a side of GDP-flavored nationalism

 

It's funny, isn’t it, how we start life with truth

Spend decades learning how to fake the very truths into lies so convenient so velvet it melts in the palette like truth was a cupcake

And then spend the rest of our remaning lives unlearning the conditioned reflex of lying in the name of honesty

Everyone wants the truth

Until it grows teeth, speaks in their mother tongue, and calls them out by name

Middle Class Memos: Footnotes from a Capitalist Daydream

They say capitalism is about dreams

But that’s a lie peddled to people like us — who confuse the corner seat at Starbucks with a share in the boardroom

The middle class doesn’t do capitalism; we cosplay it

We wear branded knockoffs like borrowed surnames,

Clutching EMIs like ambition, hoping the sheen of fake leather will pass for pedigree.

You think capitalism is about the hustle, don’t you

You think it’s about clawing your way out of your rented 1100 square feet into the penthouse life with views of the apocalypse

But wealth doesn’t come with effort, wealth comes with lineage

Capitalism isn't about making money

It’s about already having enough to make the laws that decide who gets to make more

The first generation doesn’t get rich

It just tests how far it can reach before the invisible ceiling becomes a visible leash

Meanwhile, the upper class plays chess with nation-states for pieces,

And the middle class, we scream checkmate in a game we aren't even playing

We call ourselves rebels; revolutionaries with WiFi

Left-leaning on social media; right-leaning in paychecks.

We post infographics about inequality from iPhones made in sweatshops

We quote Marx while wearing Nike drowing our middle-class sensibilities in a bottle of Irish whiskey

We’re not capitalists; we’re capitalism’s interns at best

Unpaid, overworked, and still grateful for the exposure

We say we’re fighting for the poor

But let’s be honest — we’re just scared of becoming them

The poor don’t have the luxury of theory; they don’t have the time to debate GDP, CSR, or GST

They don’t give a fuck about climate change slogans because they’re too busy surviving its consequences.

Capitalism doesn’t care for saviours; it only respects shareholders

The rich don’t argue on Twitter, they own it

And as for us, we keep checking out bank account every now and then

As if watching our balance will help it grow faster

We complain about the cost of living, while craving the costlier version of it

We raise our fists in protests against the very structure we secretly hope will advocate us

Because that’s the truth, isn’t it?

The middle class wants change, but not enough to lose comfort.

We want a new world, as long as our status stays intact.

We want socialism on the streets, and capitalism in our savings account

While craving communism in the sheets because equality in orgasms is the only achievable equality on a good day

We want to believe that we’re only one idea, one pitch, one IPO away from joining the elite.

But here’s the plot twist: You are a middle-class, and will continue to be middle-class. Period.

The capitalists don’t fear us, they fund us

They sell us startup dreams in shiny decks and cash in when we fail, because failure is just more data for their next venture

We are not part of the revolution; we are its merchandise

And every time we say “We’re building a better world,” they laugh

Because we forgot the singular truth:

The ladder we’re climbing leads to the balcony of a skyscraper the capitalists are landlords at

And while we fight to reach the top, the owners sip vintage wine on the rooftop helipad, debating which island to buy next

The Geography Of Growing Up

Calcutta birthed me—

cradled not in silk but in

lazy afternoons thick with politics

and perspiring nights where every ceiling fan

sounded like a revolution too tired to speak.

The people? Laid back.

Their anger sipped slowly like red tea in clay cups—

never burnt, just brewed.

Even childhood felt like a nap with dreams too socialist

to be sold in capitalist bedtime stories.

Adolescence came with its predictable rebellion—

except, I wasn’t rebelling against Calcutta,

I was rebelling with it.

The DNA of dissent was already coded into my chromosomes.

Authority wasn’t a villain.

It was just a terribly written protagonist

we were all forced to applaud.

Literature. Cinema. Communism.

The unholy trinity.

The Bermuda Triangle where optimism goes to drown—

and boy, did I drown with style.

Reading Neruda while hating capitalism

and secretly wishing my poems sold like toothpaste ads.

Watching Ray films

and refusing to admit my real fear wasn’t poverty,

but mediocrity.

Then came Bangalore.

More than a decade now.

New language, new food, new traffic.

Same old self-loathing wrapped in quarter-life promises.

Machh bhaat made way for ghee pudi dosa,

and one fine hungover afternoon,

I discovered puliyogare like it was a Godard film

no one warned me I’d fall in love with.

I hated veg biryani at first

(because some ideologies are harder to let go than exes),

but now I even recommend it

to lost souls in office cafeterias.

Growing up is strange.

You leave behind parents

you never really chose—

only to choose partners

who carry the same red flags

in better fonts.

Cheap whiskey with peanuts at shady MG Road pubs

morphed into single malts shared in overpriced 2BHKs

where conversations felt like therapy

but weren’t covered by insurance.

You call neither place home.

But you can’t not call both, home.

From Leftist propaganda to right-swiped matches,

from believing mutton biryani was sacred,

to devouring paneer with conviction—

I’ve changed.

Not entirely.

Just enough to notice

that forgetting to change my net banking password

bothers me more now

than failing to change the world once did.

I still carry Calcutta.

Like a folded poem in my back pocket,

creases deep,

edges fraying.

I unfold it sometimes,

read it in the dark

when Bangalore’s neon grows too loud.

And the cities—

they never fight.

They coexist like twin truths,

each allergic to perfection,

each echoing the other in unexpected corners.

Because the thing about the cities we carry within—

is they never leave.

They just learn to live

in each other’s metaphors.

In The Name Of The Holy & The Sacred Shit

Whoever said marriages are made in heaven died light years away from being married

Drunk on textbook definitions and arrogant ignorance of what married in love looks like

Ever wondered why the married never write about marriage objectively

Because the objective truths of marriage aren't bestsellers

And unless it's a bestselling idea

How do you sell it to a capitalist world pretending to be communists of convenience

Marriages are ugly, mad, angry, and all kinds of crazy and borderline psychotic

But then, had they accepted and agreed to that, it'd blemish the very heavens they said marriages were made in

And you know how most things in life are a morsels of good in periodic episodes but otherwise shades of shit; marriage is no different

Unless you maneuver the shit, you won't get to the morsels

But then again, you don't want any of that shit, do you

Although, statistically fifty-percent of that shit is your shit

But then no one likes to be held a mirror to, especially with their ass bare naked, farting and shitting all over, do they

For someone who gets fucked over by life every now and then

Between breakfasts and lunches, and lunches and dinners

How optimistic do you have to be to believe marriage is a rollercoaster but on plain land

It’s not people who have fucked over marriage

People are messy, flawed, delusional; that's a given

What fucked over people is the deluded idea of what ideal marriages should look and sound and feel like

This obsession with the 'ideal' —

Like perfection is a prerequisite

Like conflict is failure

Like compromise is defeat

As if two people can live together forever

Without wanting to run each other over in a parking lot

At least once a week

Ideal is a beautiful synonym for imaginary, except no one seems to remember

Love, Dopamine & Other Hallucinations

Love is not a poem

It’s a bad habit with good lighting, or as the new-age retards call it: aesthetic

It starts with serotonin setting you up like that shady friend who swears “This one’s different”

It’s a bluff in broad daylight

You get high on forehead kisses and shared playlists

And before you know it

You’re trauma-bonding over alcohol and daddy issues

They say love is magic

But then, deep down, you know magic isn't real; magic is make belief

A carefully crafted con job for deluded desperate people too scared to admit the universe doesn’t owe them shit

It’s a placebo sold in pop songs and paperback novels

You think you're starring in a rom-com

Spoiler alert: You're the unpaid extra in a psychological thriller

You’re not watching the movie

You are the plot twist that gaslights itself every single night into thinking "This is normal"

You romanticized it

Of course you did

They fed you Shelleys, Bollywood, and Valentine's Day capitalism before you hit puberty

They never taught you how to walk away from someone just because they were bad for your brain chemistry

Because nobody wants to hear that love is Pavlovian conditioning

That you’re just chasing dopamine with a smiley face

That heartbreak is withdrawal

That healing is rehab without the group therapy

You don’t miss them

You miss the daily dosage of distraction from yourself

Because me-time is like weekends; necessity but in minimums, overdo it, and you feel your sanity packing its bags in silence

And so you go back

You think maybe this time, love won’t be wrapped in dreadful baggages and unresolved PTSD wearing a perfume you once liked

But deep down, you know

Love is just another drug you forgot to quit

And worse?

You're already looking for your next dealer, hoping this one is sangria in a wine glass, but knowing full well it is arsenic in a whiskey bottle

Maps, Missiles, Men & Masturbating Gods

You’d think a species that survived plagues and pandemics, and would evolve into something remotely decent

But no

We grew opposable thumbs

Just to reload rifles faster

We discovered fire

So we could set newborns ablaze with phosphorus bombs

Because their parents prayed in a different direction, a direction your landlords didn't approve of

We wrote books

Hundreds of thousands of pages across centuries

So we could fight over whose pages had the right fonts and whose had God's blood all over

Look at Gaza

Look closely

That is not rubble

That is bone-dust mixed with powdered nationalism

That isn’t resistance or retaliation

That’s a war crime with better PR

Children turned to statistics

Mothers turned into target practice

Fathers turned into shadows

Carrying sacks of limbs instead of groceries

Borders were lines once you know

Sketched by trembling colonial fingers on caffeine and cocaine,

The same fingers that looted generations of wealth and spices, and yet could never figure out how to handle either

And now?

Now, they are holy scripture; sanctified, unquestionable

So much so, we don't blink twice before tearing apart flesh from bones, over them

Because imaginary lines drawn on paper maps

Hold more value than actual lives

Because God apparently owns real estate

And believes in ethnic cleansing

As long as it aligns with your flag’s colour palette

They say this is about politics

Geopolitics

Religious extremism

Terrorism

But the truth is simpler

It’s about dicks

It’s always been about dicks

This is just another limp dick-measuring contest

Between leaders with erectile egos

And shriveled humanity

Millions dead, but at least someone gets to call it a victory

Like winning a pissing match by drowning the other guy’s family

And what about the rest of us?

We hashtag

We repost

We call it awareness

As if views and likes are oxygen to lungs, caved in under concrete

As if comments and reposts can rebuild homes bulldozed by faith

They say God is watching.

Maybe he is, with popcorn resting on his potbelly full of wine, some tissues, some lotion, for his daily dose of humiliation porn

Or maybe, just maybe

He’s as imaginary as the lines we murder each other for

Maybe, there’s no God in this

Just men, angry men, petty men, power-drunk men

Hiding behind scriptures like perverts in a trench coat.

And behind them, some more men.

Clapping. Nodding. Calling it sacrifice. Calling it just.

This isn’t about who fired first

This is about why the fuck are we still building missiles instead of Colloseums for our collective shame

This is about how we turned evolution into a suicide pact

Signed in blood, stamped with flags, and notarized by apathy.

The only thing we’ve truly mastered as a species is

Dying for the wrong things while living for absolutely nothing

As They Burned, Their Gods Watched

A train moved, not forward, but back in time.

Skeleton of steel and iron—its flesh bleeding saffron.

Royalty bleeds blue, they say. But true Hindus? They bleed saffron.

This train was more saffron than usual.

A moving relic, a victory march—

A temple, triumphant over a mosque,

A parade of foreskins sacrificed to the crescent moon.

A collection of middle fingers, raised to history,

Fingers that had gripped bricks, wielded hammers,

That had chanted the name of a god

Who set his wife on fire to prove her pure,

As if she were some adulterated alloy.

But a god nevertheless.

The idea of a temple, just the idea of it,

Made the very bones of a mosque tremble.

Four hundred and sixty-five years, crumbling overnight.

You see, those who cannot hide behind faith,

Need history, need facts.

But faith is a luxury,

A blank check to rewrite reality,

Because what is a god

If not a fairy tale spun by drunks

Selling dreams to grown-ups too scared of daylight truths?

The train reeked of Hindu piss on Muslim blood.

Because piss leaves the body.

Blood—blood is all of you.

And when the blood boils, fire follows.

And fire, fire is ritual.

So the Muslims made a ritual of their own—

A funeral pyre of Hindus aboard the train.

Fifty-nine Hindus, the price of erasing four centuries of Muslim pride.

The history denied in Ayodhya was rewritten in Godhra.

Burning a train was just the preface.

It took a decade for Muslims to claim vengeance.

It took Hindus less than a day.

Because democracy is about majority.

Hundreds of women raped first, burned later—

Because you must kill what lies beneath the skin

Before you kill the skin itself.

Thousands slaughtered like bleating goats

At a meat shop that never offered halal.

What began as a lesson became a blueprint.

What began as rage became routine.

What began as a war of gods

Became the socio-political order of the day.

And I know it will stay so.

Because if you strip away religion,

You wake up to facts, not faith.

No dogmas. No godmen. No bullshit.

And that—that is the real threat.

Because religion is opium for the ignorant.

And the ignorant? The ignorant are the greatest treasure of a rigged economy.

Free Speech, My Ass

The world's all for free speech

Until it begins to tighten their assholes and question their sensibilities

And then suddenly it's about clenched jaws and hurt feelings

And crying victim or screaming it, depending on who you're playing that day: the empowered victim or the helpless one

Actions don't come alone, holding hands like an insecured lover, comes consequences

If you say you advocate something, what you think is you are an advocate of the action, but what it really means is, you are an advocate of the entirety: the actions & it's consequences

If you like fucking without a condom, the child or the HIV that comes along, might or might not be to your liking, but they'll be there, and you taking offense at them, will neither undo nor fix the consequence at hand

Freedom of speech is no different; if you want free speech, you have signed up to the risk of being offended and once you've signed up, taking offense and outraging like it's something forced upon you is fucking audacious

To think you're above and beyond consequences, who the fuck do you think you are?

To think you can pick and choose episodes of life like it was your fucking screenplay, you think you can play God and the world will bend over, no consequences?

If you find this offensive, remember, I don't give a fuck

Word of advice: you shouldn't give a fuck either!

For God's Sake

God’s a start-up — a rather bad one, at that

The first one men ever made.

Founded by fear, scaled through manipulation,

Funded by desperation and generational stupidity.

God’s a start-up built on crowdfunding,

Selling the hope of a service that never was, and never will be.

A subscription model with no refunds,

A business plan so vague that even the venture capitalists could never quite decipher the nuances of it, because bullshit gets you to places, logic and reason never could

If you really come to think of it,

God’s not even a start-up —

It’s the world’s first Ponzi scheme

The only one that never got busted.

A pyramid scheme where the self-appointed favourites got riches, palaces, and power,

While the rest just knelt, waiting for returns on investment.

But then, you wonder — what if God was real?

What if God heard me say this?

What if he’s been sitting up there,

Just waiting to serve me his vengeance,

Dead and cold, like divine fine dining?

Well… years and years of praying, begging and bargaining, didn’t get me his attention.

And if one day of questioning him does

Who’s really winning?

Because something is better than nothing.

Something speaks of possibilities;

Nothing just shuts the door behind.

God’s not real.

You know how I know that?

If God was real,

And God made men,

He would be sick and tired of men selling him —

On the streets, and in the sheets

For money, for ballots, for sex, for power, and every pathetic in-between.

If God was real, I’d be one of the few on his side

Not because I believe in him,

But because I refuse to be the one selling his ass for profit.

If God was real, religion wouldn’t exist.

If God was real, the world would be atheist.

A User's Guide to Getting Fucked Over

The government isn’t a circus.

A circus at least has clowns with shreds of self-awareness

Clowns who admit they’re clowns.

This?

This is daylight robbery, with the national anthem for background music

A crime so smooth, Michael Jackson would be jealous

A thriller so well devised, you sing along as they take your wallet.

And when it’s all gone, you’ll still be waving the flag,

Because false vanity disguised as nationalism sells cheaper than first generation wealth.

The trick is simple —

Keep the chaos loud, the people dumb, and the news irrelevant enough for distraction.

Make them clap while you pick their pockets,

Then sell them their own money back at twice the price.

With interest.

Call it economic growth.

Call it patriotism.

Call it "development" — it doesn’t matter.

As long as you call it something, they’ll believe it.

Because that’s the trick, right? You can make people believe anything

As long as you lie with the confidence of truth 

"See that line going up? That’s progress!"

Never mind that line reflects inflation, unemployment, and a rapidly declining national IQ

Blindfold them in cooked up faiths, imagined divides, and monopolised history, and they are Gandhi's monkeys 

Except this time, they're dystopian: see nothing, hear nothing, say nothing, except what has been approved by the masters

But, dare you call it out! You’re a paid gig by the opposition.

But, dare you speak the truth? You’re a fucking anti-national.

But, dare you fight back? Your existence is illegal.

And now, you are the headline.

And it’s funny, because you never really mattered.

Not to them, not even to the ones who aren't them.

But the moment you become inconvenient? Suddenly, they care.

Your face is on the television, plastered across social media forwards and reposts, like a bunch of hate-mongering billboards

Your stories from a forgotten adolescence, dug up by jobless men so old they're closer to death than they're far from adolescence

Rotten, decayed old twats, who haven’t read a book in twenty years but will write eight paragraphs on your morality, like they were critically acclaimed authors at least, if not the messiahs of morality, the same morality you'd expect from the land that taught the world how to fuck in sixty-nine different ways

The news will question your flesh and bones, the hashtags will sweepingly remark on your bastardry,

And by the time your voice reaches anyone... who are we kidding, your voice won't reach shit

It will sink in your epiglottis like a cancerous lump

The dumb ones are now deaf, and you're dumb

Your dumb and their dumb, not the same, but how do you explain grammar to the gods that failed graduation

History will not remember your name, because history doesn't give a flying fuck about matters of facts

History is a bunch of sales people, the very best of them, pitching you a series of stories suited to tongue-fuck your egos so good, once they're done, you can't tell the difference between facts and fiction

History will not even mention you as a footnote

Because they’ll rewrite it while they slice you up, head to toe, in the name of contempt

They’ll cut you in three,

One for each word of your favorite phrase: freedom of speech.

They will fuck your mother,

Invoice you for services rendered,

And slap a 28% GST on top.

Because happy endings are a privilege, you see.

And you’ll pay.

Because you always do.

Because you were raised to.

Because they convinced you it was an honor to, it's what nationalists do.

And in the end,

When your pockets are empty,

When your children’s future is crowdfunded by foreign loans because nationalism doesn't sign cheques,

When your delusions turn sober because patriotism is like cocaine, but on a stopwatch

You’ll do what every generation before you did.

You’ll clap anyway.

Dead Poets Society

He who says money is the greatest currency is a privileged half-wit whose IQ is lower than the lowest I scored in high-school math

Money is the greatest currency for the ones who have means and ways, and hooks and crooks, to get some, and some more

For hundreds and thousands others, money is farther than a distant dream blurred out in the limitations of myopic eyes

And hope, their only currency

Hope is a funny currency

It doesn't dwindle, doesn't need to be bought off at the price of your skin, meat, or corporate blowjobs

Hope sells for free

At the traffic signal, in between the deafening noise of a few clinking coins at the bottom of a copper bowl, drowned in the deadening madness of a restless crowd in a hurry to be somewhere and yet heading nowhere

And then there are a few bastards

Who couldn't find enough money to satiate their lust or enough hope to find them love

Who hence decided to spit on everyone on either sides of the road, in the name of disillusionment

Their bruised egos bleeding out poetry, in a desperate attempt to heal

But then, healing starts with belief, and beliefs are born off hope

Dead poets pile up on a bullet train to extinction

In The Name Of Faith

In a world divided between religion & science

Each often holds their high grounds

Locked in the privilege of their ivory towers

Convinced their ways are aligned closer to the singular truth

And yet the bastards raised in degenerate whorehouses

With questions as their only companions

Despite a hundred thousand frowns and promises

Knew singularities were acts of faith, dichotomy the only true consequence of reason

Religion says believing is seeing

But then how do you believe something you haven't even seen

How do you vest your beliefs in a faith so ultimate and yet so fragile

How do you let the hollow insides of a spineless truth swallow you whole while you lay down the very existence of your species at its mercy

Science says seeing is believing

But then how do you explain purple, something you see and yet it never exists in truth

How do you let your biology take the wheel when you know it's been compromised to illusions, and convinced into gaslighting you, every single day

How do you let the misconstrued interpretations of an alien truth blindfold you into a cage of singular perceptions

It is rather funny to see the elites tumble in their incessant need to cling on to faith like creatures of convenience

While the unsophisticated sharp-tongued morons give shape to the singular truth the elites hate the most: to watch their faiths crumble, and drift away, from right beneath their feet

In a world where science and religion sell for equal stakes

Order is blasphemous; chaos, the way of life

Of Fucks Given & Taken

Have you ever wondered how the truth of intimacy isn't half as intimate as the idea of it

In the shallow breaths of a gasping anticipation to the screenplay of a fornication, you've played over and over again in the boner of your brain cells

In the folds of an inexpensive adulthood rented out to the suicidal moth of an innocence, spent at the length of faded words in a worn out erotica

In the flimsy skin wrapped around the throbbing veins of your measured thickness molly-coddled to a perverted sickness disguised as desire

Have you ever wondered how orgasms are a commodity

How the stretch marks laid out across the breadths of your skin like stitches on the only blanket of a homeless, aren't aligned to the aesthetics of desire

How your ideas of sexual gratification revolve around objectifying fiction born off Photoshop & cocaine that is as distant from human anatomy as Communism as a practice is, from Communism as an ideology

How you constantly dwell at the crossroads of the duality of fucking the ones you wouldn't jerk off to and jerking off to the ones who wouldn't fuck you

The next time you think or feel, even for a fraction of a second, sex isn't political

Peel off your clothes like masks off a creature of convenience, and dare make love to the other side

From The Diary Of An Antisocial

Every time you've cut yourself open

Was it a choice or the only

Hoping blood could be the analgesic

The voices in your head stabbed in their guts to a short-lived silence

Every time you've prayed for death 

And hoped this time around your prayers would be answered

Were you your own victim

Or a consequence of the habitual failure of a consistently failing system busy judging you while pretending to be your ecosystem, called society

In a world of Frankenstein's monsters, masterpieces are but mirages

Calling victims of a well-planned genocide of everyone who didn't fit your boxes an escapist is arrogant, phrasing murder a suicide, an abomination

Un-poetry

it's hilarious to see

mediocrity team up

get down on their knees

their throats choked

on the obnoxious pride of an overrated ball-sac

their tongues spewing piss and cum

claiming they're the revolution called poetry

you know it's ridiculous

when poetry starts selling integrity faster than politics

as I unzip by a rusty by-lane, and piss on the wall of spoken word

they cough up Ghalib & Whitman like pimps peddling whores

A Fictional Idea Of Revolution

You say you're a revolutionary

A rebel born, to obliterate a system rigged against you

But then, unlike revolutionaries & rebels, your mutiny needs documented validation

Stories you keep telling the world, screaming your rebellion into the void of social media, and onto the screens of people, who make up the very system you so badly want to obliterate

It's funny, isn't it; even your revolution against the system has any meaning only when that very system approves of it

Do you think that's how Renaissance really happened, or the French Revolution

You are no rebel; your idea of revolution is as deluded as a religious bigot's idea of secularism

You are as much as rebel as Jeffrey Dahmer was a social worker

It's funny how your ideas of revolution have convinced you that gender is the enemy

In a world of binaries, you are the white pitted against a world of black

You support the non-binaries not because you understand them, but because you need them, fellow comorades in your fancy revolution

In a world that's anything but black and white; shades of greys, tinges of brown, hints of blue, at best

Let's go down the memory lane for a minute, yeah

Let's scratch beneath the shallow surface of those convenient memories until it hurts

Wasn't it your very own gender that told you how to be your gender

Wasn't it your very own gender that told you to not visit temples and not enter the kitchen, those five days every month

Wasn't it your very own gender that shamed you into household chores

Wasn't it your very own gender that fucked your love in the name of friendship

And yet, somehow, you keep telling yourself, the other gender is the problem, the enemy

When in reality, the real enemy is the idea

The idea of your supposed identity

The idea of how a certain identity has to be to identify as such

And that idea, my love, wasn't born in a singular gender

For births need two genders, the blacks and the whites, to birth

You scream your struggles in the convenience of your privileges

While you exploit the very gender you claim to be an advocate of

You say cooking and cleaning aren't gender roles, and yet you still prefer a specific gender to cook you your meals and clean your house

You claim equal pay while you deprive your very own gender of a hike, because cooking and cleaning doesn't come with performance appraisals

It's funny isn't it, how the ones who need a revolution have no idea of such ideas

And the ones who do, keep exploiting them while crying victims to the very system that enables you live a glorious life of meticulous hypocrisy

You will say I'm gaslighting you, because gaslighting is the new mansplaining, and everything that doesn't align to your faith system is gaslighting

I could tell you, it's called having a different opinion, if you'd indulge

But then this is your monologue, and I am the enemy, and no matter what the logic or the rationale, it's a battle you've won even before you fought it

A battle you need, because what is revolution, if not a war, and what is a war, without an enemy

Not an idea, because ideas can't be fought, but a body of flesh, that you can pierce right through, as and when it suits your convenience

And yet, you are the victim

Pavlov's Dog

Imagine if you for once, said what you meant

Imagine how many times over and over again, your caustic flares would have engulfed the world you're so reluctantly a co-existence in

But then, actions have consequences, and consequences aren't about conveniences

So you wrap your morbidly obese ego in a flimsy foil of morality, and pat yourself on the back for being nice

You say you want justice

But what you really want is vengeance

Justice is a concept, vengeance is an actuality

And concepts can't satiate the filthy slime of hate creeping up your guts, in your intestines

You know whoever said "an eye for an eye makes the world blind" was a rather audacious motherfucker

Once you've lost an eye, you'd rather have the world blind than preach peace in pen and paper

You say you want equality, equity

But what you really want is the privilege, but not the accountability that comes alongside

Privilege without accountability is an airplane without the wings: it's so absurd it's borderline delusional

But then the line between being empowered and being gaslit into greatness is rather thin

As thin as that foil of morality you wrap around like a pointless endorsement of nicety 

Morality is a great excuse; the goddamn ace in the pack of cards up the sleeve of your shrewd self-esteem

Morality is the greatest of all conditioned reflexes the whole of humanity has ever known; the one where you are Pavlov and you are the dog