Ideology

It was years before the red wall of West Bengal would fall that I was waiting for the girl who would become my wife, ex-wife, and one of my best friends for life. I was standing in front of my college in the middle of so called College Street or the book alley. It was November, no chill in the air though, as is the general custom of Calcutta (not Kolkata). I had just come out of a meeting of the student political organization I owed allegiance to. We had discussed mainly the immediate, how many new recruits, what the obvious scumbags from our rival organization was doing - their underhanded technique of luring away boys with fashionable girls we secretly wished were with us. However, standing there in the middle of the commerce of ink and paper, I remembered something as a fleeting memory. On the roof of our canteen, during the twilight hours, while smoking contraband, a brilliant physics student had confessed to me that his aim in life was to be a full-timer for the communist party in the state. Weren't we from a post-ideological state? After all globalization and fall of Berlin wall were a decade old for us. Woodstock was just a video. Che Guevara was a cool face on the T-shirts. Revolution was the word we shouted with vague unease or complete certainty of non-believers. We all were struggling to polish our excuses for conforming through all our struggles, so that we can laugh and shake our heads later at our own youth.

What was ideological in our stance was not the overt complicity with the systems of thought. However, it was ideological stance that allowed us to gloss over the truly revolutionary moment in all of our lives - when we finally are able to confess even to ourselves what is truly absurd, and thus truly revolutionary in its domain of illogical. Our subjectivation denies our subjectivation itself.