A few ponderings on liberty.

I have been wondering for a long time, what liberty actually means to me. Is it just purely freedom or is there a broader connotation attached to it? Liberty, is a term we keep hearing in the lines of politics, war and so many other societal institutions. I am an individual living in the 21st century and although great men in the past have hailed liberty with such glee and enthusiasm, I see absolutely no liberty in our society. Liberty never exists.It cannot exist in a society like ours, full of apartheid, cultural stereotypes and of course a fickle minded bourgeoisie.The proletariat never experiences true liberty, though it is promised to them by their masters. If we go back in time and sneak a glance at the French revolution, the feudal system existed. Landlords exploited the serfs, labour wise and otherwise. The aristocracy lived a good life with plenty of meat and wine. They had hunting parties,and Marie Antoinette ate cake instead of bread, or is it the other way around?.

The feudal system was said to be abolished, but was it ever completely abolished?. The proletariat or the working class still suffer in silence. Let us be realistic and consider one of the worlds most populated and large countries, India.The manual scavengers, are a fine example of how the proletariat is exploited by the bourgeoisie. The employment of manual scavengers and the building of dry latrines [ prohibition] act was passed in 1995. This is a law with no teeth, just like Annie Zaidi says in her Frontline article, "India's Shame". It is dehumanizing, degrading,abhorrent, but it still does exist. It is a reality. People still pick our "shit" with their bare hands or sometimes if lucky a piece of plastic and carry it on their heads. Aren't these people also human beings. The bourgeoisie engage in numerous rhetorical thinking processes, thinking about how to uplift these poverty stricken people, how to liberate them, but what they do not realize, or maybe they do realize is that they are the same people who make these people, people just like us clean their latrines and handle their excreta to be more precise. Governments hotly deny the existence of manual scavengers in their states but, the reality is that they still do exist.This is just the case of manual scavenging. Is this what we call liberty?Is this what we call fraternity?.

Liberty is such an Utopian concept, at least in my point of view.It just merely exists to pacify the oppressed, to give them false hope, to discourage them from uprising against the centre. Religions promise liberty in the form of Nirvana, or the journey to heaven. Karl Marx once said that religion is merely the sigh of the oppressed and the heart of the oppressor [ hope I am not wrong]. Religion soothes the oppressed, suppressed and the depressed. It provides an outlet for the person to relieve himself, if temporarily of the suffering and the pain. Now, the question is,does liberty ever exist? It exists in great or little minds, but will it ever suffice for the individual to keep thinking about it, to engage in rhetoric about it and to make promises that he or she cannot keep. This is something we should think about. The rich get richer and the poor become poorer. This is how the world works. There is no escape from it, because of the apathy and the indifference that is omnipresent in society. Apathy has become a deity, it is to be worshipped.It begins in college offices and ends up in high ranking government posts. The police, the village panchayat, practitioners of medicine, principals of schools, everyone, they practice one thing in common and that is, even though it is quite pathetic to mention, ' apathy'.So now we come back to the original question, is liberty present in our lives?. Think...Think...Think... I have already found my answer.
Liberty, Fraternity, Equality, Justice... these are just words found in the dictionary. If you ask a sexual minority or any proletariat for that matter, you will see whether these words actually mean anything or not. Wars are fought, people die unnecessarily. So where is the liberty, the justice, the equality?