Of Truth and Unfreedom

Prison

There is a scary idea that's haunting me now-a-days. I am not sure whether it's just a bad dream or a bloody fact which is here to stay. Surveillance, for various reasons, is one of my areas of concern. I was calling my father, but to my utter dismay I found out that his mobile phone is switched off. He was coming back to Bolpur after his operation on his own. A sense of helplessness, anxiety and tension started to churn in the pit of my stomach. In that moment of frustration an idea struck me like a lightening. Sitting in a quiet corner of Bolpur station I was thinking – is it possible to track mobile phones even when they are switched off? Or better still, is it possible to switch on a mobile phone from a distance? And then all of a sudden, I arrived at an even more sinister idea: is it possible to turn on a secret audio-visual device embedded in someone's mobile phone to listen to user's conversation?

I googled my ideas and I was really surprised that technology had already advanced to that direction. In fact, some of the web articles are dated as far back as December, 2006 [http://news.cnet.com/2100-1029-6140191.html] . The 'roving bug' can strike you wherever or whenever, you have little or no chance to protect yourself from this. So it's really a matter of government's sweet will and time when to kick off its operation against any rebel group or its leader. The discovery is a frightening one even for general users like us since our privacy appears fragile before this modern panopticon. There are many websites that now offer people softwares to do exactly that on a private level, thereby making the threat ever greater. As if we all are wearing radio collars in this digital Eco-system.

Freedom

These things lead me to ponder over an idea that is most often taken for granted – our freedom. The contemplation has a strange effect on me. In an age where our sense of self has been violently radicalized, where we all have little or no relation with our immediate society, where we all believe in 'systems' rather than on social-cultural-political life, where we spend more time in talking to people on phone than conversing with men in the offices, streets, shops who people our immediate surrounding, men have turned into ghostly shadows of their actual selves:

“ A crowd flowed over London Bridge so many

I had not thought death had undone so many.”

It's all very cool if you can participate in this procession with a non-reflecting, or at least willing mind, a mind that would be like one of those walking corpses. But the real difficulty arises when one fails to be part of this whole circus. The cheerleaders of modernity are trying their best to hide the melancholy despair that's so apparent in all of us. Our cinemas, our novels, our songs, our poems all reflect on a deep sense of loss. But in analyzing this we hardly have the answers to these issues. So a greater sense of unfreedom is what we see at every step. Even your musings on freedom will turn into your muttering frustrations on a sense of unfreedom.

Writing

Many years ago I read Alexander Solzhenitsyn's One Day in the life of Ivan Denisovich where I came across this bleak realization:

“Writing now was like dropping stones in some deep, bottomless well. They drop; they sink—but there is no answer.”

The infernal abyss has since then increased its depth. With no answer emerging out of that great hollow, our task has become even more difficult. And yet we have to keep on searching for answers. Our silent fortitude, our doubtful eyes, our outstretched hands and a language of our own are all that we have to save ourselves against this invisible tormentor of our life.