There is no other choice

There is no other choice.

The sounds of the world, if you have been listening closely, have been turning fatal. Observation is the strongest form of protest in the current times. This is the dawn of the internet. Vitality has become an essential trade because why do you think we are the ones that are left with no other choice? We might be the first and the only generation that would demand an RGB keyboard to create art because who would want to use blood and sweat anymore? The question, although at first it seems hypothetical and preposterous, the more you think about it, the more you want to know the trajectory of this forthcoming. What is our footing in the world, and so what other choice do we actually have?

Fear has been converted into an art form. We have inhabited it in our blood. The modern drug, as I have understood, is not a gun but kindness. We will not be murdered using the language of violence but through the language of empathy. If you have been closely observing anything, you can feel the death of approach. This is not the welcoming of the new world order but the reinvention of the older one. In a world full of fabrication, why do we seek truth in art? One must think that the answer to that question lies in the sentence itself, and if that thought arises in your mind, then you are probably the one whom the world needs to be safe from.

To confront the evils of the future, it becomes necessary to absorb people in the present. There are plentitudes of people and thus an uncanny abundance of emotions present in the world. To only observe is enough. Sometimes art exposes this better than argument ever could. I watched “No Other Choice” by the master, the lord almighty of present-age cinema, Park Chan Wook. He has transcended with his craft. I had heard about the carpenter himself becoming the tool, but this is the first time that I have seen a metaphor come to life. There are very few occurrences where you see metaphors come to life, where sublimation is so literal that you can see the concrete behind the idea. The composition should be limited to playing the tune, reading that line, showing that move. Applause should be your water, not cocaine. You must be ready to create not because you have to have that powder inside your body but because if you do not create, if even for a moment you let go of your chance of playing the tune, reading that line, showing that move, then you become indistinguishable from the noise and you surrender your vitality. But who is to judge, right? Have we all not collectively dropped the idea of sincerity? Who even cares?

Observation in times like these not only becomes style but taste. Semantic clarity is needed when you are filled with anger. This anger is adjacent to the lack of actual taste. How shameful it must be to become a spectator in your own life, living not on insight but on actions guided by textbooks. People who would want to watch films only as an excuse to knock on the doors of popular culture would not be able to actually enjoy anything. Their lives would be incessantly defamiliarised. To read a paragraph for knowledge, to sing a song to drown silence, to write a novel to rewrite inadequacy, to study just to avoid being nothing. It is a shame that these people exist, but yet a greater relief, for they absorb the savagery of society within them. They exist in a very particular vacuum and landscape so that whenever we rest on these paths of life, we are reminded of what not to be.

We are becoming victims of inertia. Aside from what has already been bestowed upon us involuntarily, are we becoming the byproducts of stability? Sedated by routine, are we consenting to our own stagnation? At what point did it become cool to trade authenticity for relevance? Had you been observing closely, you would know. The landscapes are changing the person, not the other way around. There are choices, plenty of them. But vitality is scarce. The living are fewer than the breathing.

It is time we stop romanticising idealism. In this lifetime, we are not building a greater forever. Those who miss being alive today will always be a day behind. And in this economy, being a day behind is a sin.