Abandon all hope, all ye that enter here!

Well, long time since my last post, but so many things have been happening that its hard to tell where to start. The happy news first I guess. Well, my inter year basketball team makes it to finals again for the third straight year, and I hope we win again. For some reason we are the perennial underdogs, even after we win. It took a god level game by mallu against the first yearites for us to win, and hats off to him. I have to say my teammates are some of the best that I have been around with, and I hope to stay in touch with you guys after this as well. Next, on the cultural front, well, thats getting over from my side, with me ending my term. I guess it ends a turbulent four years. I never expected to be this heavily into Cultural Society to tell the truth, ending up organizing all these events and all. I mean I am a person who cannot sing, dance, or act, and yet I have been completely involved with it. I will miss it I guess, and all the guys I have worked with.
I realized beyond the first few posts on a blog, its hard to sustain the momentum or keep writing blogs. Your thoughts tend to become repetetive or the motif that you try to present becomes boring as well. I try to keep things interesting by including a song or a poem or so, that way you can increase your literary knowledge plus read a poem or two. Paintings I include as well, especially ones I have seen. Remember most of these are classics and read into them with a deeper meaning. Dont go by what is said on the surface and instead see the angst of the poet/author/painter when I mention something. Evaluate it and think about it. Anyway, for this post's poem I figured I would use something with a wide relevance to the world today, W.H.Auden's Unknown Citizen. This was a classic poem, and it talks about a government who make a statue of a model citizen how he conforms and follows the rules never breaking them, politically correct, never doing anything that stands out. Reading deeper into it, you can see how the poet uses the structure to give a completely different meaning than the one that most people would get from it.

The Unknown Citizen
(To JS/07/M/378 This Marble Monument Is Erected by the State)
He was found by the Bureau of Statistics to be
One against whom there was no official complaint,
And all the reports on his conduct agree
That, in the modern sense of an old-fashioned word, he was a saint,
For in everything he did he served the Greater Community.
Except for the War till the day he retired
He worked in a factory and never got fired,
But satisfied his employers, Fudge Motors Inc.
Yet he wasn't a scab or odd in his views,
For his Union reports that he paid his dues,
(Our report on his Union shows it was sound)
And our Social Psychology workers found
That he was popular with his mates and liked a drink.
The Press are convinced that he bought a paper every day
And that his reactions to advertisements were normal in every way.
Policies taken out in his name prove that he was fully insured,
And his Health-card shows he was once in hospital but left it cured.
Both Producers Research and High-Grade Living declare
He was fully sensible to the advantages of the Installment Plan
And had everything necessary to the Modern Man,
A phonograph, a radio, a car and a frigidaire.
Our researchers into Public Opinion are content
That he held the proper opinions for he time of year;
When there was peace, he was for peace; when there was war, he went.
He was married and added five children to the population,
Which our Eugenist says was the right number for a parent of his generation.
And our teachers report that he never interfered with their education.
Was he free? Was he happy? The question is absurd:
Had anything been wrong, we should certainly have heard.

I've always enjoyed this poem as a brilliantly composed portrait of a bureaucracy taken to the excess -- the point where it dehumanizes individuals,its subjects, in the absolute. Auden meticulously selects his words to express the obsessive inanity of this mindless, mechanized State which knows its citzens only by letters and numbers, evaluates their worth with statistics, and has a formulaic standard for virtuous living. The tone of the final two lines -- a spokesperson's spin on the situation -- is both ironic and chilling.
Its a poem against mindless bureaucracy, it could be a Marxist state, a capitalist state such as ours which promotes vote bank politics, a communist state. It also shows how statistics cannot measure things like brillinace, and radicality two important things to any government.
In a similar parallel, I think IITR here also promotes an Unknown Citizen. I mean the adminstration would rather have an Unknown Citizen rather than a person who questions things and fights for his opinions. Also the "citizens" here accept this fact largely and do not question the system that sets in. I am not saying that I am different, me personally being part of the system, but its still not right, and for the time I have left, I want to be a "Known Citizen". Submissiveness in class, in extra cirricular activities is highly promoted by the adminstration here which isnt always the best option available. Anyway this bitter diatribe against this has to come to an end now, as I get ready to go to class again more due to attendance problems than anything else as the sem ends. Have fun y'all and hope the title from Dante's Inferno doesnt put you off.