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Sunburst On A Car Bonnet

Posted on February 27, 2007
Filed Under The Stories |

It was the night before Holi. He needed this, he needed it like most others need a hole in their heads. He didn’t think of the second half of that sentence, he always stopped himself after the first bit and went for it; hell for leather and all that. He prided himself on being sensible about the decisions he made, most of the time. The jury was out on this particular decision but he didn’t believe in the American legal system anyway so he didn’t think twelve strangers would have been able to judge him any better than a single judge could accurately assess the actions of a man in his peculiar situation.

A peculiar situation it most definitely was and he had done very little to extricate himself from it. In fact he had done more to throw himself to the wolves than most of his enemies could ever be credited with doing. Hell, he had developed enmities by following this brand new path he had placed his life on. It was a journey towards truth, if it is possible to call any one man’s set of beliefs the truth.

It all actually started with the Devil. And the fact that he enjoyed making an idle mind his workshop. See Shirish did not put too much stock in Western systems of justice but he sure regarded the ideas espoused by Western religion with a great deal of respect. He got the whole God and Devil thing. It was simple enough for him to understand and therefore accept. He had been idle for a while, waiting for the developments that would decide how he spent the rest of the year, i.e., working hard for laughable sums of money or wallowing in the heady cocktail of guilt and regret that plagues those living the lives of freelance unemployment.

He got mad one day. Actually his temper started to rise after sunlight reflecting off the bonnet of his car caused him to bump lightly into the car in front of him when the traffic light went red. The driver of the car got out to complain and swear even though the bump had caused no damage to his vehicle. When he was alone again, the angry rant in his head veered drastically off course from the fuckwit in the other car to vent on the entertainment industry and how its members seemed to be able to do no wrong.

It was as if the newspapers and the television shows were mocking him. He didn’t understand why the celebration of mediocrity had become such a popular national pass-time. He didn’t see how other people couldn’t tell that there was something wrong with the way the media would go to any lengths to make excuses for the heroes they had anointed, even after said heroes made it a point to disappoint at every important juncture.

He had been more than happy to be one of the guys who said way more than they did for most of his life. And then he found himself with a lot of spare time and the development of a conscience that decided to assert itself upon him at a point in his life where he was powerless to ignore it.

He started small, with the odd sarcastically blunt statement on a sports blog or at the bottom of another article extolling the virtues of a movie star or art world darling who neither deserved the media space nor the right to be practicing his art form. The first few comments went uncontested and that turned out to be enough encouragement for him to make more bold statements in clearer language. His first two comments were greeted with complete silence but when he put down in great detail, what he thought was wrong with a movie so puerile that it should have brought forth the nation’s upchuck reflex instead of the praise haze that seemed to have settled over the eyes of every single critic and tastemaker with the ability to get an opinion published in the nation’s media. He hated everything about the movie and said so in a blog comment that appeared after no fewer than eighty-three mini orgasms about the performances, the lighting, the style and the substance of the piece of celluloid feces that seemed to have the whole nation in thrall.

For close to six hours he refreshed the page continuously to find no reactions to his comment. And then it began, a torrent of agreement so great, so vociferous and so unwaveringly agreeable to everything he said that he was forced to wade through the comments to confirm that he had indeed insulted every facet of the movie in question. He had and yet his comments seemed to have upset no one. This was a movie made by a director whose fan following was legendary. It starred four actors who could collectively have rounded up an army of warriors to go into battle for them that was larger than the population of the entire country. And still, it seemed that the people had been holding their virtual tongues and waiting for just one person to put forth the case for an alternative to the status quo in cinema, art and music in an erudite and thoughtful manner.

He had never ever felt so alive in all his time on the planet. He stayed up through the night and half the following morning corresponding with the people who had nearly crashed the website’s server with their outpouring of agreement and gratitude for somebody’s finally being able to take a stand against the swill they were expected to pay for in the name of entertainment.

Emails were exchanged at a rapid pace and within days plans were made to evolve a new system that would work as an alternative to the old one. There was a place for truth, in reporting as well as entertainment. Nobody felt that all movies and books and art and music needed to deliver a message. Everybody agreed however that each piece of art needed to have been developed enough so that it stayed truthful to the world it created. All entertainment was created for the purpose of escape. It was their contention that there could be no escape from any individual’s reality if the escape was so badly structured that a blind man could see the lack of continuity in a cinematic story or a deaf person could hear that the singer hadn’t even bothered to properly learn the lines before recording her album.

It was the night before Holi that he stopped being another disgruntled consumer and became the father of a new method of enforcing checks and balances over the way entertainment was produced and consumed. It was on the night before Holi that the discerning consumer got a voice. The irony was that no one knew his name.

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