The UnRealist

Realism, much like mother’s love, confidence, brown bread and religion, is a thing of the mind. It exists because we desperately wish it to. It exists because we are told it should. It also exists, perpetuates itself to infinite and infinitesimal proportions and decides us for ourselves as well as interprets us for those around us because we do not encourage or dare to entertain any other alternative to it.

In many mainstream cultures, beliefs and the education ecosystem that claims to develop our younger torch bearers, realism is tacitly invoked at first and obviously inculcated as the years add on to the impressionable mind. The underlying thesis, the one most widely purported to encapsulate realism, is a stolid and staunch resistance to allowing impressions to be formed. In fact, the soft sand of the mind is a sign that realism has not yet fully taken hold of the individual. As that soft sand hardens, to eventually become unyielding not just from the surface but from the core, realism is reassuringly understood to have taken irreversible shape. This fundamental resistance, unconsciously allowing nothing to impress, impregante or even infiltrate is so widely admirable as the surest symptoms of the realist that the possible mainstream has now quite surely become the alternate. Much like art house is art house simply because commercial is easy, popularly indoctrinating and in a queer way, really fun.

The tolerant is admired today as the tolerant because its antithesis is, after a fashion, the thesis. The alternate, the marginal and the peripheral are all points of view. Their existence is solely dependent upon the frame of reference and the contextual connection that they are pinned with. Much like anything else swirling in the cosmic soup. However, any soup that doesn’t quite allow for the experiment, is not open to chucking strange things in itself and otherwise discourages and even ostracises those that think of doing so, is dangerous and self limiting.

A realist, in other words, is admirable almost entirely because (s)he is a part of the collective that is admired by the many. A sorry reason to be admired, I believe. If admiration purely comes from the statistical majority, somehow I feel it is devalued. Or more correctly, undervalued. The aspirations of the modern, empowered and complex individual cannot surely be to be only admired by hitching one’s wagon to the star that is longest in vogue. That shamefully underestimates all that we can be capable of.

What doesn’t exist is scary. In fact, it is worse than scary because it is unknown. The envelope that houses our emotional reactions to situations has known or familiar cases. But what does not exist needs a different envelope as a tool to handle it. This one, among other things, must have as a necessity two cases. One, imagination. And the other, wild courage.

Imagination, because apart from being its own reward, it is the only bridge between what doesn’t exist and what eventually does. The only code, the only juice, the only sanction and the only engine that makes possible happen by wallowing in the impossible, the improbable and the impudent. Imagination, like the Royal Bengal tiger and basic human decency, is under threat and fast on its way out of the mainstream; edged out to live on the fringes of the popular and the populist. Like harlots and Harijans.

Wild courage, of course, because it is better than domesticated, trained and choreographed courage. But that aside, wild courage is very important because that kind of courage has very little precedence. It has very little comfort and confidence in its lineage. Purely because it doesn’t have any. It is a bastard courage. A courage without pedigree and genteel upbringing. It is not valour, or chivalry or even daredevilry in the face of trying situations. It is a strange, unhinged and fairly unglued kind of courage. One that does not know very well what to do when faced with an opposing scenario. Simply because it does not depend on any for either its existence or identity. This kind of courage makes new roads, new skies, new possibilities and even new enemies. But in the unformed, the unpaved, the unyet and the untested lie its deepest definition. Because all of its life is devoted to making the could-be happen.

While in realism lies the sure and surefooted, in imagination lies the next world. Indeed the next universe. And relentlessly pursuing this world and this universe alone is a fucking shame.