A speck in the crowd

"That the powerful play goes on, and you may contribute a verse"

                                                                                               - N.H. Kleinbaum, Dead Poets' Society

It doesn't take long for a man to figure out how much a part of the crowd he is. He needn't even step out of his work-home prison - all he needs is a walk to a colleague's desk or a peep into a neighbour's house to realise that he is doing nothing new.

Everyone is doing the same work, listening to the same music, making the same tax calculations, having the same conversation with his family, making similar plans for the future - buying a house, starting his own business, whatever. Each one, however, is so lost in the process of doing it that he forgets that he is nothing different. Another ant in a colony of thousands. Invisible. Lost.

Our lives have been designed by businessmen, the media, engineers, doctors and people  a thousand other professionals. The toothpaste we use, the courses available for study, the books we read, the procedure for a passport, treatment received in a hospital, a product we buy - whether we want "the best" or "something average", lives of people aren't really different. One man struggles to pay for his daily bread while another, his son's college fees, but the struggle is unanimous, why, omnipresent. It's all just one big template.

All this sprouts from the fact that one man cannot do everything for himself. Further, from an administrative point of view, it is good to have standards, but there are disadvantages. What if someone wants to be something that doesn't all into the list of things he can be? C'mon, you say? I must be crazy right? I'm the guy who says passion is a term coined by people on watching movies and reading books - a term they use to get away with doing anything they want to. But, humour me - don't you think someone has a skill that is not accommodated in the list of things that people do? Have we tied the hands of people from truly doing what they want to - perhaps what they should be doing? Of course not, right? Don't we read success stories? People who do random things and get their names into the Guinness Book, who come on TV shows, people who start companies? Are we being honest with ourselves here? Failure story numbers are exponentially larger than their success counterparts, aren't they?

But should we do something here? Something to improve this? Perhaps something we can "learn" from another country or state? I personally don't think a country can learn from another - countries, why, even cities are like wild weeds burgeon out of nowhere in an abandoned land. In fact, I am only surprised at the similarities. It is virtually impossible to incorporate something at the grassroot level - at most, we can copy points from another Constitution.

Right, so, what do we do about it? Dismiss is as a negligible shortcoming and move on, back into our stereotype, boring lives that we deem unique and important because, well, we do need to survive? Perhaps we should take a little something out of this thought and, well, "live for ourselves" for a little while? Perhaps develop a strong value system - a set of principles to abide by? Others do that as well, don't they? So what? What does it matter that our lives are similar?

Yeah, well, that would certainly close this discussion, and would even dismiss the need for this article, but I can't help but think that we are chained in this life.

I guess life will end long before we find out. Unnoticed but by a few, and long forgotten before long. Yet, I hope it will mean something. At least to me.