I was born to a man who believed the government was a religion.
Not metaphorically. Religiously.
With faith.
With fear.
With rituals mistaken for values.
A god whose faces change like chameleons shift complexion.
A scripture written in circulars.
A morality that changed tone but never intent.
In a middle-class household,
a government job is not employment.
It is orgasm.
The kind that justifies the marriage.
The kind that forgives the compromises.
The kind that turns survival into honour,
wages of slavery into dignity,
and retirement into a vague promise of heaven.
Four decades of service.
Fixed timings.
Fixed morals.
Fixed spine; bent only when required,
then straightened again just enough
to be mistaken for integrity.
He believed service to his nation purified a man.
That proximity to authority was proof of virtue.
That obedience, practiced long enough,
matured into wisdom.
Vanity is a dangerous thing.
But vanity wrapped in patriotism
is a hereditary illness.
Passed down as discipline.
Diagnosed as values.
Everyone thinks they’re immune
because they say the right words
at the right volume
in the right posture —
because the job came with a chair,
a badge,
and relatives who finally spoke with pride.
Patriotism was never about love.
Love asks questions.
Patriotism hands you answers
and calls doubt disrespect.
It doesn’t change with time.
It morphs meaning.
My father thought serving the country made him permanent.
Like loyalty comes with tenure.
Like time converts into belonging.
Like obedience compounds interest.
He believed the system remembers.
That effort leaves residue.
That years become proof.
They don’t.
Belonging is never earned.
It is granted.
Temporarily.
And always revocable.
Here, existence is not guaranteed.
It is reviewed.
You can give your youth.
Your health.
Your silence.
Your spine.
Your children.
You can pay your dues
in money,
in time,
in belief.
And yet, nothing, absolutely none of it, matters.
Not a shred. Not an inch.
Eventually, power gets bored.
And boredom is authority’s most honest emotion.
So it asks calmly, administratively:
“Prove you exist.”
Not prove you lived.
Not prove you served.
Not prove you complied.
Prove you exist.
Existence becomes paperwork.
A form.
A signature.
A stamp applied by someone who doesn’t know you
but controls your validity.
One error and you’re a footnote.
One correction and your past becomes negotiable.
One revision and your lineage turns suspicious.
And when, out of habit, or exhaustion, you ask
what was done with what you gave —
the labour,
the taxes,
the integrity shaved down to fit policy,
they reassure you.
Nothing was taken.
Your integrity was never sold.
It was loaned.
Loaned to a permanent class of power
that survives every era
by changing accents, not instincts.
Men who mistake longevity for legitimacy.
Men who sit long enough
to believe the chair belongs to them.
They run the same structure everywhere.
Different flags.
Same factory.
A human sweatshop
where obedience is renewable
and dignity is not.
Where mediocrity rises because it doesn’t threaten.
Where ambition is corrected.
Where silence is rewarded
until it becomes tradition.
Patriotism, then, is not devotion.
It is resignation to a dysfunctional family.
Stand here.
Say this.
Look proud.
Forget later.
It is not love of country.
It is familiarity with captivity.
And the cruelest inheritance
is not poverty,
or fear,
or silence.
It is teaching your children
that the flocking obedience of sheep make them honourable,
while the very shepherd entrusted to lead them,
reserves the right
to erase them, like specks of dust.
