Ever since I heard about the London Riots a few days ago, I couldn't help but feel a sense of exhilaration at the exciting times that London must be witness to these days. With the shops and showrooms there for the looting and the streets there for the vandalising, London must truly be looking like an anarchist's paradise these days. Oh wait, but I'm no anarchist, so why am I so happy about the state of affairs in London and why am I giving off a vibe that I'm rooting for the "revolutionaries" in their quest of "bringing down the establishment"? The answer is easy, I'm thrilled about the prospects of having to analyse the agitators' psyche.
Let's be honest with ourselves, everyday life sucks and anything out of the ordinary is exciting. Look how the media houses exploit any potential for arousing this idiosyncracy of man by providing eye catching, nail biting coverage of anything new in the world, anything that could (hopefully) excite us. Hence the word news, hence the phrase, "What's new?", because we all know what's already happened and I'll go so far as to say that we're bored of it. As an exercise, I would recommend calling your friend and asking, "What happened in 1999?", I bet that you won't receive any calls from him/her for the foreseeable future. So, to cut the long story a little short, we like "news".
With that in aspect, I doubt there is anything more exciting than the potential for a huge fisticuff. Alright my choice of word in the matter is not appropriate in the current scenario, but it sits well in explaining that the only characteristic that could give Man's desire for making Love some cold perspiring nights is Man's Love for making War. The world wars, Indo-Pak wars, near world destroying cold war, Vietnam war, Gulf war, Six-Day War are just some of numerous examples that show that nations like to resolve issues through usage of ammunition . It would be wrong to denounce both the warring parties here, but the aggressor's actions lay claim to the view that combat is the best solution for a major chunk of the world's population and no matter how hard the pacifists and the real-politik believers try, this ingrained confidence in one's marbles has led and shall lead to conflagrations.
So how do we connect the dots and bring the phenomena that I touched on in the contemporary dissidence scene. The London Riots were purportedly instigated by the incompetent London Metropolitan Police's handling of the Mark Duggan incident. First of all it is very unfortunate that the shooting happened, but I couldn't be led to believe that the police shot an innocent man without cause or provocation, and even then without it being somebody's fault. Exercising blatant authority over the citizens is a right reserved exclusively for the Indian police. The London riots were sparked when fed up hooligans heard of the shooting incident and saw an opportunity to cause a stir against the establishment. Their ingrained hunger for war added fuel to this so much so that they managed to keep up the nasty work for days. Others joined in as they saw something new and appealing happening. Obviously unemployment, the tax increases that have hobbled UK's economy, added to the fact that the current government got their image handed to them by the recent phone tapping scandal, an opportunity to loot some HD LCD TVs and expensive paraphernalia from all over London, and a chance to get back at the Paukis who've "come here and taken all the jobs away, those scum", all were factors that must have contributed to these riots, but I chose to override them for the sake of academics.
This also brings into question how we would behave when we're fed up of a certain entity. What would happen when you are fed up of the new shoes you bought a month ago and are not allured by their quaintness anymore. What would happen when you're ignoring your friend because you have been with him for a week and are frankly pissed off at the same old jokes and are begging for some new faces right then. See, this is an oddity in our lives, we want something, we would do anything to achieve it, we would spend days, months, possibly years striving for it but then when we achieve it in the end, we look back and think, "Well, this sucks." People always say it's not what you get in the end that's important, it's the journey. I'm inclined to believe that because man's psyche puts him at gunpoint and tells him to hate what he's doing/what he's achieved in the next 3-4 months. And after those 3-4 months, that man bored out of his guts about his present situation starts pondering about what he has achieved and finds that what he has achieved isn't all that awesome as he once believed and concludes that the life journey he lived towards achieving this goal was the important bit. According to me, all that is well and good, but as discussed before in the pursuit of something new, man will get on with his affairs, and the "journey" that he was pondering over will sit there in the "STALE STUFF" portion of his memories.
This is the world that we find ourselves in where nothing enamours us for long no matter how good the prospects. Each entity has a certain "good" period before it becomes routine and loses its appeal. The returns are the same but our perceptions lead us to believe something different. These diminishing returns push us to explore new avenues, so as long as that can be put into perspective, I understand why the rioters rioted. They wanted some fresh air.
To end it all, reminiscing memories is good.......................for like an evening.
Oh and yes :
Anyone who has ever looked into the glazed eyes of a soldier dying on the battlefield will think hard before starting a war.
-Otto von Bismarck , he was a psycho but I agree with him on this and emphasize that all that I wrote before, while it may have elements of truth in it, is mostly horseshit.
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