The Rebel’s Recitation

The Rebel 1.0
Introduction

All’s not fair in life. How could someone know that s/he was going to be born in a trouble-torn land, where revolution is equated with extortion and morality is measured by the warmness of used condoms found during raids by vigilante groups in seedy food stalls? However, it is the same land which makes a rebel who they are.

A rebel is a product of the contemporary dark ages: an era when robbery determines your status—the more you loot the more you gain respect in a deeply fragmented society. The rebel appears in the era of listlessness when the meaning of life is defined only during chronic social unrest. The rebel appears in the era of insanity. The rebel appears in the era of gloom and doom. The rebel believes in defiance not denial. The rebel defies not for the sake of defiance but because s/he believes the possibilities are inherent in this world to make life fairer for s/he believes as well that it is well within reach. The rebel is no Che Guevara. The rebel is no Subcommandante Marcos. The rebel is no Albert Camus. The rebel is a rebel, none below and none above him.

The rebel is a force. The rebel is an embodiment of the science and the arts. The Osho school of spiritual thought claims that man undergoes evolution though the 3Rs: reform, revolution and rebellion—where reform is a kind of renovation, re-painting the old and the worn-out; revolution destroys the old to create the new; while rebellion, the highest form, changes consciousness. It is the individual and not the superficial and orthodox unlike the previous two stages of reform and revolution. The first two stages also somehow echo the Kafka’s observation that ‘every revolution evaporates and leaves behind only the slime of a new bureaucracy’. The rebel sees this clearly in a setting where there is a constant fight for power in the name of politics and society. However, his/her destination is not the result of the fight. The destination is humanity; the beginning, the end and everything included in it.

At the base level, the individuals legitimise the authority through mutual agreements and incentives. This includes the political groups, the state machinery, the latter that is separated into executive, legislative and judiciary plus the several institutions and agencies patronised by the state, and even the antagonistic armed organisations. It is the role of a rebel to break this connection. Politically charged individuals and groups would find fault in such a kind of observation as idealistic and irrelevant. But that is the whole purpose of the rebel and his existence. Ulterior motives lead a man’s action but for the rebel, the only motive is enhancing the living experience. The bleakness has made him apolitical but enlightened. The existing wind does not carry him rather he goes against it.

A rebel believes in being proactive instead of being reactive. If the highest form is individual, how do we explain the group efforts?  At face value, a rebel is abnormal in a society where no man is an island unto oneself. However, what is abnormal is the society where it is perfectly fine to go with the flow no matter how harmful, serious or defective the system is. When murder, robbery and loot are the order of the day, the abnormal is the one who sees no problem in it. The abnormal is one who sees that it is the reality, that it is the norm and that it is the thing that we can do little about. There is no question of group effort. The answer lies in an individual consciousness to help understand and act accordingly.

Consider the mob justice, economic blockades, general strikes, sit-in protests, street protests and so on. That’s abnormal in the guise of normal, which we love to believe for we are constantly forced to put up with and it becomes a kind of a routine, a norm that is perfectly sane. The rebel knows the contradiction and stands neither for nor against the scum of weary daily lives.

The Rebel 2.0
Affirmation

For such a political move it is hardly surprising to be apolitical. Politics reeks of shit. Those in the mainstream are overwhelmed by the national politics that sees not even the slightest crap in a local setting, while some of the shits are relegated to as regional issues of unemployment, law and disorder that the nation can never afford to give attention to. Those outside the mainstream are in awe of political thoughts of 18th and 19th centuries that are as well filtered from ideas of foreign origin which has no relevance whatsoever in the first place. The only visible progress is the constant and often violent confrontation between the power players. The rebel has no role but to get rid of these insane and absurd experiences.

First thing first. The state is a legitimate entity so it has more responsibilities. And that’s also exactly why it needs to be destroyed first. The rebel is a pacifist but not a dogmatic individual who would sleep over when the world is exploding, standing on the dais of doves and white flags. An individual is eternal; the nations and states are fleeting groups of individuals that change over a certain period of time. S/he might as well help the nations/states’ reach their end, their demise, a little sooner with some sense of humanity.

The rebel is apolitical or else s/he would have been finding ways to sneak into the establishment. The rebel has no respect for those who believe in solutions from working-from-within-the-system. Those who have gone in have become puppets and the best thing they can look forward is to wait for superannuation, like those retired colonels and lieutenant colonels who gain epiphany of social change in two years after their retirement, something that they could not achieve in 30 or so years of their lives in the so-called active services.

The rebel does not believe in diplomacy, in spirit and in essence. When the ship is sinking and everybody is plunged into the water, civilisation and all its components of resilience, grace, elegance, refinement and mannerisms are only as good as the people who do not know how to swim. Diplomacy, no different from civilised characteristics, is required when we are building an entity but not when we are nose-diving into primitivism. In a word, civilisation, diplomacy and all the craps are secondary when the primary purpose is to create, express and defy today for a saner living tomorrow.

- Concluded.