When it's not worth dying for?
Does it take your breath away
And you feel yourself suffocating?
Does the pain weigh out the pride?
And you look for a place to hide?
Did someone break your heart inside?
You're in ruins"
-21 Guns (Greenday)
Its been a habit of late to start writing with a song.But I did not put this song just to continue the trend. I intend to write about it, to dissect it and appreciate it.
I have been born and brought up in a place where its is a luxury to have a week without a bomb explosion, a shootout of someone from a family, which fortunately I don't know, getting killed or maimed. It has been happening for the last 10-20 years. It does not matter who is responsible or who needs to take "revenge"...It just makes me wonder about this song.
I have been away from my state for around 10 years. Thousands of dim eyed idealist have died in the process. Some due to bullets but most due to cynicism. Idealism is scorned, dreams not expected to come true. But you know what is more scary than the death of a dream? It is the death of the collective dream of a society. When society become lethargic and looks for a way to push its worries under and looks for a way to escape.
It was started as the noble fight, but somehow it became a fight. When was this nobility lost or the chivalry lost, no one knows or no one cares. Those who set about to change the world only managed to change themselves. Does it take your breath away, and makes you suffocate?
Everyone suffered and suffers. The ones who set out to change and ones who wanted status quo. Life was never the same. The sense of injustice and deprivation gives birth to idealism as well as a fatalistic view of life. The problem are due to "others" and not due to your incompetence and lethargy. When entire society goes into a dreamless sleep, we should not be surprised at why our dreams did not come true.
How about the idealist who were and are seduced? They fall for it but beyond a time they cannot come out. Its a vicious cycle. They can come out only by damming themselves but to damn themselves is to destroy the very idealism which made them love themselves. How can you love anything else when you hate yourselves? How much can you love yourself when every moment you are trying to ensure you survive?Does the pain out weigh the pride, and you look for a place to hide.
I guess its easy to write and talk about all this by sitting 1000s of mile away in a AC room and typing out a blog in ones free time and listening to Greenday on Youtube. But I guess I will try to keep my idealist in me and not become a cynic at my impotency to change anything.
Life will go on. An entire generation will be scorned at, laughed at or even detested by future generation for failing to improve the society. People will get tired and hungry and desperate. Dreams, now destroyed, will come again, maybe in different form.
But will our generation be able to believe in ourselves that we can change this world?
