Enslavement through consumerism

It is festive season in India and lights and colors are starting to flood everywhere. The festivities are going to stretch through Christmas to New Year so everyone is gearing up for lots of food, merriment and catching up with their families and friends. The business world is not far away either and in fact, they are way ahead of their customers. The objective is not just to retain customers and lure away new customers from competitors but also to make people spend more. How they do it is so enticing that people get bewitched and allow themselves to be sucked up into the vortex of unreasonable and senseless spending.

Every time I make a purchase from a mall or a supermarket store, my mobile number is taken from me and I get periodic alerts about discount sales going on in these shops. I came across a very interesting and enlightening post on a social network a few days back which goes like “If a retailer is selling a $1000 product at a discounted price of $750 and if you rushed to buy it because of the discount offer, you did not save $250 but lost $750.” It is common knowledge how a retailer is able to sell a product at a discounted price. The break even and profit margins have already been covered during the initial sales of the product without any discount and even when they are selling at a discounted price they are still making profit from each sale. But people strangely do not consider this fact when they fall head over heels over discount sales. There is one more factor that many people are not aware of. Large scale manufacturing of branded materials, especially clothes happen in India for which quality control is very stringent because these clothes are shipped abroad and sold in the most exclusive stores in the US and Europe. Even a stitch that is not in line gets rejected and these items get sold in the local market. So if we go by brands and standards, we are mostly getting to buy items rejected under international quality control rules.

Now that the festive season is on, I am getting at least 4 alert messages on my phone each day. These are not just about discount sales, they go like purchase for Rs. X or more and get assured gifts like TV, refrigerator, A/c, etc. Two factors to be considered here. First, how are they saying Rs. X? How did they arrive at that number? Reflect for a second and we will know that they are scrutinizing customer purchase and customer preference details intensely all along. A whole lot of number crunching and analysis is going on behind the scene and they have sized up their customers very clearly. Second, if I purchase gold for Rs. X and I get a TV, the same company which is selling gold is not selling the TV as well. So is some retailer giving away the TV for free? Absolutely not. This simply means the profit margins have already been calculated and fixed by all concerned parties before any sort of discount sales or offers are rolled out.

But what has astounded me is the way this is played out. Every time I switch on FM radio now, every channel is loaded with festive offer advertisements from retailers. It is common knowledge that Indians do spend lavishly during festivals and they take pride in showing off their gifting prowess to friends and relatives. Retailers have pinpointed this and they position themselves precisely even with their advertisements so much so that they ensure people see these advertisements everywhere they look, on newspapers, hoardings, radio, TV and every other possible means and we start evaluating these retailers and their offers and end up purchasing from one or more of these retailers eventually. They are bombarding our psyche and manipulating our minds so ruthlessly and we, like slaves, are letting them be. The media content that we are consuming each day is just staggering.

I was listening to a FM channel the other day and one song is usually accompanied by 10 minutes of advertisements and then the RJ keeps talking about something or the other for another 10 minutes. My mind flipped immediately to a stark reality. Millions of people go to work each day and they hardly get time to speak to their families and friends all day. The only conversation they have all day long is about work. These RJs are actually filling up the empty spaces in our lives and we let them speak directly into our minds which is why we keep listening to whatever they say and to all the advertisements that are played in between. This is why so much of radio air space is being consumed by retailers because they get to manipulate our minds so easily.

I always do my purchasing according to my needs. I know a lot of people wait for discount sales to start to do their purchases but that logic doesn’t fit into my line of thought. What about time value of money? If I need something today and if I do not buy it because I want to wait for a discount sale that is a month away, what if I do not wake up tomorrow morning or I die in an accident? By making ourselves enslaved to the market and by getting trapped in it’s wiles and guile, we are allowing the market to dictate it’s terms on us and make us do our purchases at their whims and fancies. We have chosen to forget that customers are always the kings and our enslavement will continue as long as chose to be treated as slaves.

 

 

An objective look at God, Universe and creation

More than enough has been said and written and everyone is trying to find out the truth about our origins and about the history of our planet and the Universe. This is all leading to one point, the creator of the cosmos and everything in it. I have been baffled by this all along because it is extremely weird why we would want to know about that entity or whatever is out there and how would that knowledge make any difference to our lives, but it is getting clearer for me now. I am starting to believe that we have been looking at the wrong things and asking the wrong questions all along.

 

Fundamental to all of this is our flawed assumption that whoever created us also created the Universe. Ancient Indian texts, largely ignored as a collection of mythical fantasies are actually a lot more than that. They say we were created by someone called Manu and ancient Sumerian texts say we were created by someone called Anu.  Coincidence? But is it mentioned anywhere that Manu/Anu created the Universe or our planet? No. I believe we are looking at the word creation from all the wrong perspectives. Do we have the ability to create? Yes, we procreate so we are able to create our own beings and we are also creating other living beings now. We also have the ability to create non-living things and we have filled this planet with them. So if we have the ability to create so much, what about the abilities of the entity that created us? What if we find this entity and then come to know that this entity is also searching for the one that created it?

 

When it comes to creation, I have never come across anyone asking one question. We all know atoms are the building blocks of everything in the Universe. Question is, where do atoms come from and how do they get created? Ancient texts say all of us have an element of God in us and in scientific terms, this is nothing other than atoms. So when we make a car or a TV, it is basically atoms manipulating atoms, correct? Similarly, someone manipulated atoms and created us. This means creation has been delegated across the Universe. According to Indian texts, the Universe is created at the dawn of a Brahma day and destroyed at the end of the day. The span of a Brahma day/night is about 311 trillion earth years. During the period of Brahma night, there is nothing or there is absolute void. So does this mean no atoms exist in that state? If this is true, then during dawn, one of the below two things are happening to kick start the creation of the Universe:

 

1. Atoms are being released from somewhere or by someone and the source is also created from atoms.

 

2. Atoms are getting created from some other fundamental cosmic particles.

 

In both cases, this is just plain manipulation of atoms. So the question we should be asking here is, how can atoms manipulate atoms or what is it that enables atoms to manipulate one another?

 

What is our purpose for the search of God or our creator? We were created by someone or something whose powers and abilities were beyond what we could fathom and we ended up worshipping it, just like we were worshipping everything in nature in our early days when we did not understand nature. We have always needed someone beyond our comprehension to look up to for us to keep believing that this entity will solve our problems when we cannot. The question here is why can’t we make our lives better ourselves when all it should really take is to change the vibrations of the atoms in and around us?

 

Trying to understand the Universe and its creation is like peeling an onion. By the time we reach the core of the onion, our eyes will become so watery that we will not be able to see anything. We know about 2, 3 and more dimensions so how many dimensions might exist? My grandma used to say there are 2 x 7 = 14 worlds. Did she mean dimensions or Universes? What did she mean when she said 2 x 7? Do dimensions exist within the realm of a Universe or outside of it? Does our Universe have 14 dimensions? In which Universe or dimension do we exist now? Is it possible to travel from one dimension or Universe to another? When we die do our souls travel into another dimension or to another Universe? All of this is always going to be beyond our realm of understanding.

 

Creation, destruction and recreation of the Universe can be substantiated from the fact that this process is mirrored across the Universe. Everything in the Universe has a start date and an end date which is life and death for us. If the Universe can be recreated, so can we be reborn which proves reincarnation of our souls. At the lowest level, we can simply say atoms are being reused. This is where it gets interesting. Why does everything that happens in the Universe happen? Why do stars disintegrate? Why are black holes formed? Why do planets collide? Why are we born? Why do we experience all that we experience in our life time? Is it that the information from everything that is happening in the Universe is being recorded and stored which can be used for the further evolution of this Universe or even for the creation of other Universes? There is something called Akashic records which has been mentioned by many as a repository of knowledge of the Universe that exists in another dimension. The fundamental question here is why, why all of this happening. The objective of any investigation is to find the motive and that is exactly we need to find here as well. If we find out the why, everything else will fall in place.

 

If we start looking for answers to these questions, we will have no time left to quarrel and squabble with one another because from the perspective of the Universe and creation, the life we live now will not make any sense. Though we are all made from atoms we are all unique in our own ways. This is true for the animal world as well. Similarly, what we experience in our lives is also unique. This is the real beauty of creation and the most intriguing aspect of the Universe. Once I realized this, whatever is happening in our world, be it with politics, murders, rapes and everything else has stopped affecting my mind. The Universe is learning and evolving and it is gathering information from every possible means. No God is coming to save people from getting murdered and raped. It is for us to decide what information do we want to pass on to the Universe and lead our lives accordingly.

 

Finally, when someone says God, think atoms.

 

 

The conflict couldron called Kashmir

So here is a hypothetical situation. I have a bone with a certain Mr. X who stays in a different neighborhood. Mr.X wants to make my life difficult so he rented out another house he has next to mine to a few shady people. Now these people were poking fun and trying to misbehave with my wife and kids so I called in the police and got them thrashed and thrown out of the house. What happens next? Mr. X will most likely rent the house to more wily people. Because of my family, I am not in a place where I can take the fight to the door of Mr. X because I know a direct attack can lead to direct retaliation.

This kind of sums up the situation India and Pakistan are engaged in at the moment. Will the so called surgical strikes that were done across the LoC stop terrorists from setting up bases on the other side? No. Is the Indian government going to be able to deal with the Pakistan government strongly on this? No again. Jammu and Kashmir, the bone of contention between the two countries had seceded to the Indian government through a referendum. Then when Pakistan occupied half of the region why were they allowed to keep it? Why was the LoC allowed to be drawn without taking back the part of Kashmir occupied by Pakistan? India has fought 3 wars with Pakistan and every time truce was called, India has retreated back to the LoC without standing firm about solving the Kashmir issue.

Question to be asked is, was it the ineptness of the Indian government each time or was it because of the need to keep a conflict alive and burning so that it could be used by governments on both sides as and when it suited them to serve their purposes? The political equations in the region are beyond rationale and comprehension. Pakistan is doing a threesome with the US and China. US and China don’t see eye to eye but China is propping up Pakistan because they don’t see eye to eye with India. The US dumped weapons in Pakistan and trained Afghan tribal warriors to fight against the erstwhile Soviet Union because they had beef with one another during the Cold war. The causal effect of that conflict is precipitating into India as terrorism and in spite of the US knowing about all of this, they still provide billions of dollars in aid to Pakistan every year, fully knowing that a large part of it is being redirected to providing support and logistics for terrorism and for buying and making arms and ammunition. Now the US is cozying up to India because India has a huge market for business opportunities and they want to use India strategically because they have a bone with China. Outrageous stuff indeed.

All these double standards being played out are on everyone’s faces in both countries yet nationalistic emotions get stoked in their minds so easily against one another. India and Pakistan are portrayed as mortal enemies by the media but the question that needs to be asked is, does every Indian and Pakistani consider it that way? Does every single Indian and Pakistani have such bitter experiences against one another to shed each other’s blood? I know people from Pakistan and when we met, we never spoke about Kashmir or war or any of those things. For me, it was just like meeting another human being. I am a diehard fan of Strings, the music band from Pakistan and I am ready to travel to hell to meet them someday even if hell happens to be in Pakistan. I was sordidly observing the outpouring of nationalistic emotions among my friends on Facebook in the past couple of weeks and the vile and negative energy that was getting created. It is a known fact that military engagements happen at the LoC on a regular basis and casualties happen on both sides, but the lesser known fact that media and governments wouldn’t want the world to know is how soldiers on both sides celebrate Diwali and Eid Al-Fitr together.

People in both countries have to deal with rampant corruption, inflation and lack of development and prosperity and one reason for that is the massive expenses that go into maintaining the respective military establishments. When people are struggling to eke out a living each day and make ends meet, where do they have the time and space for holding hatred and grudge against one another? The conflict situation is created and maintained by the political establishment and fanned by the media. A closer look will establish the fact that every time either government’s popularity sags and people start noticing their pathetic governance, Kashmir flares up. It is the political rhetoric that keeps igniting trouble every time and drags everyone into it. Lives get lost each time and no one cares because it gets brushed away as collateral damage. How long will the 18 Indian soldiers who lost their lives be remembered and how many of these self-endorsed patriots know the names of each of those soldiers? Public memory is short and all of this will be forgotten in a while and that is all there is to it.

People elect representatives for governance and the political system has been created and maintained by the same representatives. If there are issues at the political level, politicians are and should be solely held responsible for solving them as well. Now Pakistani artists have been chased out of India. Well, they don’t get paid for free when they come to India. They have to work hard like everyone else and they also have to deal with the uncertainty all the time that flare ups between the two countries can happen anytime and they are the first people who could get targeted. They are being asked to condemn the actions of their country if they want to stay in India. They are also just normal people trying to make a living and how does a politically triggered conflict even matter to them? A recently released Bollywood movie, Happy Bhag Gayi is worth watching in this context. Shot in India and Pakistan with actors from both countries, it is a remarkably lighthearted story of an Indian girl who becomes a runaway bride and reaches Pakistan accidentally. It is a complete laughter riot and when I watched the movie I realized that I have to sit in a group of Indians and Pakistanis to truly savor it.

It is almost 7 decades after independence and since the conflict has started and no governments in both countries have tried to put their foot down and solve the issue once and for all. This means they want to keep themselves as part of the problem and they never want to be part of a solution and this is a clear sign of their intent. What is painful here is the plight of the people of Jammu and Kashmir on both sides. Those people are living out their lives with soldiers at their footsteps each and every day. How about both countries deciding to take their hands off from Jammu and Kashmir and letting it be a separate country? How about giving the people the choice to decide how they want to live? Who cares? I know how conflicts work now so there is no point pitching in on either side. It will only fan the fire even more and help in maintaining the conflict which is exactly what the perpetrators of conflict expect to happen.