By Ramjaane
A few years ago, if I couldnt remember something say a name of a café I visited on my trip to Jaisalmer I quickly googled it, got my answer, and moved on. It satiated my immediate curiosity and that was that. Today, I am scared to Google anything. Because along with the search come stamp ads, click-through banners, sponsored posts, and whatnot. And they haunt me in the form of an offer be it on tickets, clothes, shoes, accessories, or cuisine. Relentlessly urging, pushing, and pestering me to buy something or the other.
I recently changed my WhatsApp status to Hey there! WhatsApp is using me. Friends were amused, family was confused, but nobody saw the point. The point being this: We arent the consumers anymore, we are the products. Theyre selling us to others. Those they sell us to, sell back to us and know more about us, thus making buying and selling an infinite loop. Its like the game we played in our childhood days pass it on, no returns taken to a whole new level.
What are they selling? In one simple word: Desire. If you see something, and you see it everywhere, you want it. In a New York Times essay titled My Year of No Shopping, American author Ann Patchett wrote, If you want something, wait awhile. Chances are the feeling will pass. If you dont see it, you dont want it. But today, there is no way to not see it, because your screen is constantly popping up with an offer on your next desire, even before youve added the first one to the cart.
There is a sale almost every day; for every season and every occasion online retailers offer discounts summer, monsoon, Akshaya Tritiya, Mothers Day. Heck, when they run out of imagined occasions, they announce an End of Reason Sale. Theres no escaping sales, even in the offline world. To keep up with e-commerce, malls are selling the most ridiculous items at dirt-cheap prices that make you think why dont they simply give things away for free already.
While on one hand, the world fuels my desires, on the other, it is urging me to give up my ambition.
The truth is, all they want is for us to give into the temptation and buy.
We are are a generation of voracious consumers. If we didnt have to make a purchase, wed probably find no reason to get out of bed. (Although today, we dont even have to get out of bed to buy something.) But thats only half the story.
The other half has something to do with desire.
My mother taught me a simple thing about desires: If you have desires, you work toward fulfilling them, and you pay for them. Herein lies the rub. While on one hand, the world fuels my desires, on the other, it is urging me to give up my ambition. But without ambition who will pay for desire? (Did you just involuntarily mumble papa?)
We live in a world that is slowly making ambition a bad word. It is telling me not to work, its romanticising weekends, hating on Mondays, glorifying quitting, giving up, throwing in the towel. Sometime during the beginning of the decade, it became fashionable to hate on Mondays. Forwards like After Tuesday, even the week reads WTF became hugely popular. Working hard, doing a routine nine-to-five job, was frowned up. You needed to find yourself, be yourself, and not be a slave. Eighty-hour weeks were for losers.
Taking a sabbatical became fashionable at first, then it became a necessity. Go out there, see the world, Pinterest urged us. Take a break year, or at least a quarter. Apart from the internet, Bollywood played a huge role in asking us to work less, party hard. 3 Idiotsportrayed the nerd as the loser and the genius as the aspirational one.
But it forgot to send us an important memo: Most of us arent geniuses. That we need to work hard. If everyone followed their heart, who would sell insurance?
Imtiaz Ali added fuel to the fire with Tamasha where Ranbir Kapoor goes from having a successful corporate life to a successful dream-like life. Only because working hard, all clean-shaven and dressed in formals, isnt him. And this isnt just a desi phenomenon. F.R.I.E.N.D.S. portrays Ross the only person with a meaningful job as the proverbial loser while Joey and Phoebe, who are perennially broke, are the cool cats. Over the years, hard work has become synonymous with selling out. Ambition has become evil.
But how can we have desires without ambition? Isnt that dangerous? Shouldnt we buy only what we can, and if possible only what we need? Why is there such a strange dichotomy between desire and ambition? Here are some low-hanging fruits for an answer: We dont need to earn or save because our parents have, we arent planning families or children either.
These are the obvious ones. A question so important needs more probing. When asked why he attempted to climb the Everest, Edmund Hillary simply said, Because its there. Basically, the answer lies in availability. The Pepsi Thi. Pi Gaya campaign exemplifies this best. I wanted it, I got it, I had it. Simple. Whats wrong with that? Wheres the guilt? Or the shame? That it was available is reason enough to have it. Plus if its available on a discount why shouldnt I have it? I am not spending money, I am saving it, dont you see? I need to save because I am not making money. Im making nothing because I am not getting a job. Clearly, the lack of ambition is also a function of availability.
What we want (desires) is available. What we need (jobs) isnt. And the grapes have turned sour. Since we arent getting any jobs, were telling ourselves wed rather not have them in the first place. And were trying to convince those who have them, that they shouldnt. Facing the truth? We didnt sign up for that. So, weve convinced ourselves working itself is evil.
There was only one option left. Blame the government. That, however, has recently become a crime and in some circles, even blasphemy. We all know how that ends.