“Jab Mill’o ko inhone bandh karvaya, tab aadmi ki kimat kum aur zameen ki kimat badh gayi… us zameen par inko yeh uncha uncha building bana ne ka tha… zameen khali karvaya kisne? apan ne… aur aaj, is uncha building mein baitha kaun hai? Builder, Leader, Businessman… aur upar baith kar mujh ko neeche dekhta hai aur bolta hai… yeh, yeh gangster hai”
– Closing dialogue from the biographical movie “Daddy”, made on Arun Gawli
(When these guys got the mills closed, the value of humans decreased and that of land increased… on that land, these people wanted to make skyscrapers… who got the land’s vacated? Me… and now, who is sitting in those buildings? Those leaders, businessmen, builders… and they are looking from up there down on me and saying… This guy – he is a gangster)
The place we live in Singapore – feels like a resort… Beautiful, clean, organized… Life is extremely comfortable – trains run on schedule, roads have no potholes and are in great condition – hence rides are comfortable… there are helpers at home – so there is time to write such articles…
But just below the condo, goes a gutter, where all the waste flows… And every day in the condo comes a fleet of cleaning staff to ensure all the dirt is removed from the waste bins and in the public areas…
For the MRT that runs precisely, there are hundreds of migrant workers who work night after night in tunnels to lay and repair tracks, cables and other things – and they are certainly not paid as high as most of the people using the trains… Same is the case with the roads – thousands of low paid workers build those roads at a remuneration that is a fraction of the car owners who use the roads…
And the helper’s who enable the luxury of time in our life – they are away from home and family and are paid a pittance…
I can go on – the point of the matter is – we think a gangster extorts… it’s immoral… it’s criminal…
But what are we doing in our own lives?
The truth is that we ourselves want to exploit – the need to differentiate is the basic driver of capitalism… it is really the rule of the jungle of might is right – where what “might” is – is now packaged and sold in a different form as skills and not naked brute power… but its application is exploitation…
There is no perfect market – where forces of supply and demand determine the returns… the ones at an advantage try to ensure they maintain the same with any and every head start they can get… giving as less as possible to anyone else… See the video link and you will see what I mean…
And are we truly skilled so differently to actually have these differences in privileges? That is what I pondered in the article of guilty of privilege...
But that is not the point of this one…
This one is about how we fool ourselves that we are someone different than a gangster…
The only difference between us and a gangster is that we do not use physical force per se and that the degree to which we nakedly exploit is different… The similarity is that we try to exploit using unjust head starts, influence markets unduly, take advantage of someones difficult situations…
And it is not just the economic exploitation… the fact is that we truly actually believe that such a class of people, such jobs are absolutely of a level which we cannot fall down to or accept in our own lives…
BUT – our lives would not even function in a way it does if we were not on a daily basis using those people’s services… So we want that class of jobs and people to exist for our benefit and comforts…
All these people are of paramount importance to our society… but we want to exploit as much as we can in name of market supply and demand… in name of skills being paid appropriately…
Do you see how we are the gangsters to that class of jobs and that strata of people? Wanting to hold them to an economic ransom, socially discriminated at a subtle level… and yet not believe we are the mafia?
When I was young, I had actually realized that in today’s capitalism, everyone wants to hoard and collect as much as possible for oneself… and give as little as possible so as to continue the society… and the leaders and the politicians put a fake mask of socialism to redistribute via welfare schemes as least as they possibly can so as to avoid a mass uprising or a revolution against the blatant inequality that is being created…
That is what I thought when I finished the movie “Daddy” and heard the last dialogue… That what Arun Gawli felt after being used and then called names by the same businessman and leaders… is what all the people whom we call as blue-collared workers must and should really feel about us… that how we use them, exploit them and that we were the gangsters in one sense for them…
And that how as someone who is in the middle in this human societal layers… whilst feeling hypocritical for the ones below me… do not myself feel exploited by the ones above me… how conditioned our minds have become to find comfort based on our surroundings… to adjust our expectations of what is fair and what is not… what the rules of the game are… that the threshold and yardstick of justice has so easily become subjective & molded by this reality for most – enabling the continuation of this unjust state…
Inside VG... 