This last week I was at the Andaman Islands
and as is customary, visited the Cellular Jail. The group I was part of,
arranged for a tourist guide to tell us tourists about the place that once had
so many regular visitors but none with the romanticism today’s tourism holds.
The guide showed us the “cells” that give
the jail its name. Cramped one-man holding rooms with their singular source of
ventilation being a window located at a height beyond reach. Yes, this was a solitary
confinement prison and the architect had planned well indeed. So had the
colonial rulers. Surrounded by the deep sea on all four sides, the prisoners
had no choice but to turn to the devil, and hope for kindness.
While I walked through the prison cells, I
had in mind this vision, of an aggressive, cruel prison warden wearing the
Khakis of the Imperial Police, with his mind hell bent on devising newer and
ever more sophisticated methods of torturing the prisoners. The guide was now
taking us into a room where they had kept a mini oil mill. He told us how
instead of bulls, men would be yoked to the mill and had to move around all day
to make a certain amount of oil. He said if the men failed to do it, or displeased
the authorities in any manner imaginable, they would be stripped, strung to a
pole with their hands and feet fastened and whipped till they lost
consciousness. He showed us a life size model of a prisoner being whipped by a
prison guard. The image in my head flickered a bit. The guard there was not a
European but an Indian dressed in Indigo shorts and shirt with a red turban.
Now, I know that the British rule in India
could never have been possible without the help, support and the manpower of the
Indians. But seeing it there, as a life size statue, with one Indian whipping
another into submission, to obey the will of a foreigner was startling. For
some reason, I heard Leonardo di Caprio inside my head, holding a skull and
explaining how the part of the brain responsible for submission was bigger
inside the head of negros. Was that it? Were Indians also cursed with this
appendage to their brain that made them inherently more submissive than others?
How many chained Djangos were beaten into submission here by the unchained
Djangos?
Or was i being too unkind on myself and my
countrymen? Should I just call it a survival instinct? With an impoverished
country and dying jobs, who wouldn’t want to take up a job, any job, that was
available and promised to pay well? Even if the money came from a man who was
from another country? Would we do any different today? Probably not. Well, what
if after taking up that job we realised that it would mean that we had to beat
up our own countrymen? What if it said that for us to grow, we had to stab our
friends, and people that trusted us, in the back? Would we still do it? Would
we be just as barbaric and self-centered and desperate as our countrymen were
one hundred years ago?
The more I thought about it, the more I
felt that we would be no different. And it has nothing to do with our brain or
its appendages. It was as human as having two eyes and a nose. The same scene
was playing out today, all over the world, in the confined, climate-controlled
corporate boardrooms. True, the tools had gotten sophisticated. Admittedly, we
abjured violence of the gory kind. But, the bloodlust in us has remained
unchanged. If snitching on a teammate at work would put us on our manager’s
good books, we did it quite eagerly. If hiding information from our colleagues
at work would give us an edge over him, we went two steps ahead and spread
disinformation to confuse our colleagues. If surrendering our self esteem and
becoming a sycophant would get us ahead of our colleagues in the rat race, we
would give up our spine and be the doorman at the corner office.
And who are we kidding? Our colleagues aren’t
little angels, floating around looking for our best interests. They’d do the
same to us if they had the chance. Isn’t that the justification we give
ourselves? Isn’t that what we tell ourselves every night before going to sleep,
as the faces of those we betrayed float in front of our eyes?
The steps to our professional growth
remain, as they always did, paved with the burial mounds of people we’ve gladly
walked on to get there. The colonised man became the whip of his imperial
bosses. The corporate man, with his tie and creased collar, proves that he is
the true heir.
“It doesn’t matter! It’s just a minor
compromise! Hey, look, do you want that bonus or not?” questions that have
continued to help us digest the sight of our faces in the mirror.
Our guided tour around the prison complex
continued, as did my excursion into the dark recesses of my own mind. Would I
have done the same? Would I have been “flexible” like the whip on the guard’s
arm? Or would I have been stiff like the bleeding back of the prisoner? Which
one am I now? I felt that, despite our
salaries and bonuses, we were corporate prisoners. Nestled comfortably in our
cubicular jails, with all comforts that were denied to the prisoners here, we
feel ever more unsafe and insecure, constantly waiting for the next opportunity
to dig a grave for the ones ahead of us so we may comfortably ascend the
corporate staircase.
By this time, I had also climbed the steps of
the staircase that led to the central guard tower. From here every single
Django, chained and unchained, could be watched. From here the sea was a
stone’s throw, seducing the confined with dreams of freedom and scaring the confiner
with waves of jobless destitution.
