POSEURS

It’s an ‘All-India Bandh’ to protest ‘mehengai’.

Now call me slow, but I do fail to see how breaking bus windows and burning shops will reduce prices. Maybe the Government should keep subsidizing fuel prices, so that the ‘common man’ who owns 3 gas-guzzlers does not face any problems. Maybe he will even start eating less now, so that wheat prices miraculously fall.
If only there was some way to educate our barely literate politicians. (I say this assuming they are interested in anything but vote banks, which is not likely.) If only they stopped to wonder why wheat prices have rocketed this year, in spite of a rise in world wheat production. Somehow I think shaking your fists at TV cameras and wrenching women off local trains is more fun than learning about derivatives and how it is affecting our country’s poor.

I look around me. I look back at my childhood. There are poseurs everywhere.

Authoritarianism in schools. Sexism in pubs. Racism in cricket. Honour killings to uphold our culture.

Finally I am able to put my finger on why my school life was not as flowery as St.Claire’s. Not being the typical obeying adolescent that my conservative convent would like to breed had its drawbacks.

I remember an incident in particular. A teacher who had taken a dislike to me (the feeling was mutual) refused to hold fair trials to pick someone to deliver the annual day welcome speech. I was given a secondary role, which would have been fine if I was not more capable than Candidate No.1, who delivered her daily apple to the teacher’s desk. A friend and I were even dropped from a school play, on account of us missing one practice session, which clashed with an out-of-town hockey match that solicited our attendance.

What I resent the most – are the posers, the pretenders.

Like all the politicians out there today. Like all teachers who bring kids down because they dared to speak out. Like a mentor who you trust to look out for you, who ups and leaves when you need them the most. No looking back. The people who allow Moscow to be a Country, because the boss said so.

World over, punks are looked upon as something like lepers. And it’s not because they are suspected of doing drugs (most punks are in the straight-edge scene which has a strict no-drugs agenda) or even discovering a weapon that kills millions at a time. Or maybe taking cost-cutting measures that have ruined the lives of thousands at Bhopal. Hedge-fund managers whose collective greed has brought about the ruin of millions. No, these people continue to live in mainstream society, respected for their bank-accounts, while punks are ostracized for not wearing a wig over their bright purple hair, to impress the interviewer.

I’ve heard people dismiss punk music as ‘simple’. So only complex cords and uneven half beats are worth listening to? That’s exactly what a poseur is missing-simplicity! He will never understand the unpretentious, aggressive yet melodious music that stands for individualism and freedom. That’s how the movement started, protesting the professionalization of music, with everything else. It’s tough to be Yourself. To sell Yourself.