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Banters from a Youth in Dystopian times..

There was this guy I knew a few years back. Not that I knew him much but we were in general talking terms. He was the kind of person who in general gave out the aura of being in an eternally doped stage, with occasional banters that earned him the fame of being an intellectual lunatic. One day I caught him in the middle of his banters. With blood shot eyes, he started mumbling something. Well, banters are something that does not demand audience per se, although it would not be too bad if banters were heard, even if not supported.
He called me, “Hey you budding economist! What’s up? Repo rates up, down or sleeping in your pockets?”. I, unable to find a suitable witty answer to this, tried to say something in the lines—that I am not an economist, you know. Like doctors or engineers getting a degree becomes doctors, engineers etc, but not the poor students of economics….even a post doctorate does not make anyone an economist. He asked me what I meant. Well, I mean, I could become a PO, a professor, a banker, a risk analyst, a journalist,  a painter, a cinema director…but may not be an economist…you know those who claim to be economist after graduating are bullsh……He cut me short… “you know we are a lost generation”
I looked at him, “Excuse me?”
He continued without paying heed to my question, he trailed on---“The problem is we do not have a crisis…an existential crisis I mean. And unless we have a crisis, we aren’t really fighting for anything or standing up to anything. Our parent’s generation was the last to fight for anything meaningful and then they fought to uproot anything that we could fight for. They earned enough for us to live our lives till we started becoming anything…well what we become didn’t matter really. You could be a doctor, actor, singer, writer and a host of analysts, analysing a lot of data. You could become a statistician or keep on solving unsolved riddles in math. We could buy a camera and started becoming photographers, taking photographs of cows, clouds and lost souls smothered in ash but none of it counts because we aren’t actually doing something meaningful….” He paused.
I tried to protest with a few not-so-pessimistic views and he continued his banter. “ the crisis, I say is important, because it is like a touch stone. Without a crisis you do not know your passion. Would you still keep on painting if your head hangs under a guillotine? Would you still study physics if your church comes and says, that you either say the sun goes around the earth or you die or have a bottle of hemlock..”
I tried to cut short… “you are confusing Galileo and Socrates”
His eyes looked to somewhere in the canteen roof blankly and he uttered ‘Immaterial’.
“you know we have become palimpsests… we say whatever people around us say, we do whatever is trendy…”
I tried to interject “ Don’t say that .. we still have protests nowadays… we walk the streets..”
“Yea with candle lights and then put up a post ‘ feeling revolutionary’ ..”
--“not really, we have stood up for causes”
He gave out a short hysterical laugh….”Did that cause really matter to you? Did it boil your blood to the extent that you could go and shoot the person you are feeling angry against?”
“But…but ...that’s not civil”, I mumbled.

“Could you go and kick the gut of the rapist you so hate and detest and hold in spite”
“That’s dangerous…I mean, I would want to…maybe but I would not actually do it..”

“precisely… we are a lost generation… we do not even know how to love… we do not know what it is to love in the time of war, to love and to fight, to love and to build, to love and to lose…to love and to vote, to stand for rights..we have lost it..we are losing it and will become vegetable soon..we..”

I knew I must leave. I was feeling inferior …and I did not definitely know inferior to whom? To long lost lovers, revolutionary or fighters….but then these are the banters of a lunatic…

“Perhaps a lunatic was simply a minority of one. At one time it had been a sign of madness to believe that the Earth goes round the Sun….. He might be alone in holding that belief, and if alone, then a lunatic. But the thought of being a lunatic did not greatly trouble him”… the horror was that he might also be right.

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