On that note, let me tell you why culture—the searing operas of Verdi, the laconic retorts of Leonidas to Xerxes, the tumultuous, plague striking, machinations of the French intelligentsia, just before the cusp of 1789 is just that: worthless.
Mankind, you see, has grown from its shell. It has, I would say, outgrown its shell. We no longer need culture, we have, mind you, no want of it. The courtly estates of an Edwardian mansion, in the by lanes of a forgotten city in the hills, is just that – forgotten. Therefore, ladies and gentlemen, what must it give way to, I ask you?It must give way to….. sobriety.
Streamlined, clean sobriety is what man needs. One step for a man, one giant leap for mankind. You know what that step left on the face of the moon, as Mr. Armstrong stuttered about to take a 2nd and a 3rd and a 4th and 5th? Just a crackle of lines delineated in a clean unkempt polygon. What does the Edwardian mansion signify, your majesties? Lavish rooms, large dining halls, bathrooms the size of my yearly allowance quadrupled. All of this and yet more.
But is this what countless famines teach us? Could that Edwardian mansion, on a lonesome hill, ever give shelter, and food, and a few annas to the common thief?
Do you really mean to tell me, listener and viewer (you are both and you aren’t at the same time. Isn’t that what the beauty of the IT revolution is? Breaking identities and reshaping them like an alchemist making a philosopher’s stone?) that men are born free, but they should still be talked to in their mother tongues when they live and prosper? Surely not. If they are to have successful careers, if they are to make something of themselves, respectable men, they must be spoken to in a well-kempt, simple, plain language which helps them shoulder the burdens of their mother’s labour and turn that labour into redundant products of central banking postmodern economics.
Do you really mean to tell me that a crumbling palace in an oft-been to plaza must be restored to its pristine, serendipitously stoic demeanour in all its magnificence? Surely, the taxpayer’s money can go and line the pockets of our own brethren, instead? Isn’t that what the supreme text of this republic – the constitution – tells us? Brotherhood for all? At least, brotherhood for a few is still better, ladies and gentlemen, than brotherhood for none.
And so, I’ll ask you again! Do you really wish me to swallow the harsh, gurgling puss of a notion that a dying folk song that reverberates across the hills, alphabets like the moon on a cloudy midsummer night when two long lost lovers meet, a long lost way of painting the crevices of that Edwardian mansion should be given a priority to the malaise that swings to and fro like a widowed housewife with 3 children bargaining for a job from the clerical department in the city of Djinns–Delhi?
And so, before I ask you again, you might say I have mixed up my notions of what culture is and what it isn’t? And notwithstanding any harsh-feelings, ladies and gentlemen, on that note, I can tell you all over again, “why culture is meaningless”, if you care to ask.
Chaitanya Basotra is an 18-year-old law student who likes to listen and write. He is also the youngest WriteBeyond scholarship fellow at ALMA Magazine and writes for various columns.
