What you saw..

Identities have a funny way of alienating entities.

Drawn in physical resemblance, expressed though localized pervasion of customs, reinforced in rigidness of opinions, identities are an attempt to define my existence much before I became conscious of the infinite abstractness surrounding the very idea of it.

Color of my skin, build of my skull, twirl of my hair, and style of my beard –all cues should converge to stack me in nomenclature of religion, race and regionality.

Choice of my favorite movies, culinary predilection, my pick of books, love for piano rock , should that tell you something about me?

Or subconsciously I am blaring for your attention and too self-effacing to admit it and subsequently surrendering to subtleties of aesthetics.

No, I don’t have a problem with that tattoo on your butt-crack or the belly piercing. It makes me notice you in a way I wouldn’t have in the absence thereof and heck I don’t know what to make of this visual mimesis.

Don’t get me wrong… I am arguably blasé to your desire to resist blending in banalities of average Joe’s fucked up, uninspiring nay unexciting existence. I totally get that…exactly the way I get people’s absurd conformance to logic-defying principles of saying no to animal’s meat on some days of week or deferring big purchases, etc , etc.

Such instances abound, and my humble upbringing in the aegis of God-fearing parents ensured I was in decent know-how of religious do’s and don’ts. So chances are I might know what I am talking about--- now, here is the thing --- When societal tenets set the coordinates for us to baseline the predictability in our outwardly appearance and religious outlook , adherence to an Identity is sought but as a continuum of the content. Now, When I refuse conformance and the tell-tale signs of my raucous dissonance tear down the sanctity of ‘Identity’, hither-to understood in its last archetypal version, paradoxically I am still desperately trying to carve an ‘Identity’, albeit presumably a different one.

Content may have got contaminated but tenacity of concept… never… it just gets louder in assertion much to the dismay of the harbingers of generation gone-by and it's contemporary proponents who remained steadfast believer in the purity of everything that was bequeathed.

So the compass of Identity has moved from an expression of collective noun to desire for intense distinctiveness.

Identity1.0 had the loyalties of larger group with underlying assumption of uniformity of opinions across its subscribers. In contrast, new notion of Identity has practitioners shifting away from the periphery of Identity’s paraphernalia to embody the very idea itself. It’s no statement on the profundity of the new state or genuineness of the new members yet it promises to devitalize the spell of proverbial ‘opium’ under which we have been held for long.

Call it the celebration of individuality, manifestation of our inflated persona, call it your fuck-whatever, even though the world we know has shrunk to the size of your smartphone, it has also placed us in a crucible of yawning contradictions.. its numbing to make sense of several lives we live, trying hard not to let the Identities we grew up with come in way of Identities we long for and Identities we let go of. New order is not just about the movement of enterprise’s production base and extension of their supply chain… it has also heralded the era of cultural trade where aspirations and opportunities are not in parity (understandably so)…where tradeoffs run the business of life and ensconced in the instruments of hedonism we talk about this rut.
Funny!! may be Sad..


PS: ‘Identity’ -2003 was my 3th brush with MPD( after ‘Psycho’ and ‘Primal Fear’) ...climax was a beauty.