This is not a book review: 1984 by George Orwell - Unexpected Catharsis of Sorts

When i started reading the book, i immediately recognized the dangerous similarities it had with the Indian government and its ideology of today. Little did i know that by the end of it, i would be in a situation where i would have regular nightmares of having said 2+2 = 5 for the first time in my life.

Rupa kindle edition cover

1984 is a masterpiece. I think i was still a teenager when i read Animal Farm. I remember liking it but did not think its author would be capable of writing something that would shake my being this thoroughly. For example, when i read my first Marquez, i knew i wanted to keep reading him. The same with Sylvia Plath and many others. But Orwell wasn't one of them. He now is. I will have to read Animal Farm again.

My cheap kindle version was by Rupa and had many typos. The first note i made was to the line 'habit that became instinct'. I wrote - ' (that's) how evolution works'. I thought of how Muslims of India might evolve to be more responsive to ordinary sounds in the neighbourhood, picking up any hints of an organized attack that will be later labelled a 'riot'. Delhi had just witnessed one such befor the Corona virus pandemic shut everyone inside their homes. The events in my personal life that followed that week, have, however made me scared of even having such thoughts. It was a week of accusations that broke my heart, what was left of my confidence and integrity.

The brilliance of the author can be seen from the time he names his fictional ideas. Most of these names later became words that even laypeople use. Big Brother, for instance has come to represent everything Big Brother. Orwellian became a word, thanks to this book. The ironical names of the ministries is at its best with the Ministry of love. This description is chilling. 

The Ministry of Love was the really frightening one. There were no windows in it at all.

Look at the part where arrests are described. I immediately brought to my mind some arrests i had seen on TV. Salman's for not standing up during national anthem in a theatre in Trivandrum, Kerala and more recently, the arrest of Thwaha for possessing some Maoist related documents. Both by Kerala police. 

It was always at night—the arrests invariably happened at night. The sudden jerk out of sleep, the rough hand shaking your shoulder, the lights glaring in your eyes, the ring of hard faces round the bed. In the vast majority of cases there was no trial, no report of the arrest. People simply disappeared, always during the night. Your name was removed from the registers, every record of everything you had ever done was wiped out, your one-time existence was denied and then forgotten. You were abolished, annihilated: vaporized was the usual word.

During the pogrom on Muslims in Delhi following the anti CAA protests, India witnessed children with communal eyes unleashing violence on fellow human beings. 1984 describes children of the time in a similar manner. They usually reported their parents to the Thought Police if they even said something in their sleep. 

Nearly all children nowadays were horrible.

It was almost normal for people over thirty to be frightened of their own children. 

In the worst of times, what gives a human being strength is the following sentence in the book. 

Nothing was your own except the few cubic centimeters inside your skull.

Those precious cubic centimeters.  

In a lot of places, the fictional country reminded me of BJP - RSS rule in India. Some of the scenarios the author had thought for this detestable country are already true for RSS - India. See here for instance. 

It was not true, for example, as was claimed in the Party history books, that the Party had invented airplanes.

What have they not claimed? From medicine to science and technology, they claim everything was invented in the vedic period by hindu saints and such. The fictional gods rode planes. So they invented it. Indians are all too familiar with these narratives now. And on top of all that there was the work that Winston had to do at office, changing dates, speeches, all documentation to tally with ever changing government narratives. He takes a moment once to reflect on something that is true for all fictional government narratives.

It struck him as curious that you could create dead men but not living ones.

Similarly, the observations about Newspeak, the propaganda language of the government are representative of what authoritarian governments want to do with our thoughts. Language creates identity therefore it can be used to restrict one's identity too. 

...Newspeak is the only language in the world whose vocabulary gets smaller every year?” 

the whole aim of Newspeak is to narrow the range of thought? 

So by restricting the number of words, an authoritarian government can actually restrict the scope of our thoughts. By deciding on which words shall be valid, they can control our thoughts. This book was waaay ahead of its time and was brilliant. The words part made me think, that so conversely we have so many words because our thoughts widened and we felt the need for more. And then some more. A beautiful thing to happen, is it not? 

Something i hate when happens has been described just the way it has to be over here.

because of the angle at which he was sitting, his spectacles caught the light and presented to Winston two blank discs instead of eyes.

And here comes a beautiful line. With meanings and associations so diverse that it's amazing how so little words can weigh so much. 

Was he, then, alone in the possession of a memory? 

Am i? I always ask this of myself. Am i alone in the possession of certain memories that changed my life? The accomplice in memory creation often forgets that what we created, leaving the other guilty of a memory crime. It's sad but true in the case of most memories. 

And how does one confirm if the feeling we have that we have seen better, seen different, seen something else? Orwell explains so beautifully, i want to kiss his hands that wrote it. 

was it not a sign that this was not the natural order of things, if one’s heart sickened at the discomfort and dirt and scarcity, the interminable winters, the stickiness of one’s socks, the lifts that never worked, the cold water, the gritty soap, the cigarettes that came to pieces, the food with its strange evil tastes? Why should one feel it to be intolerable unless one had some kind of ancestral memory that things had once been different?

Our ancestral memory will never leave us. If we have as much as a beard removed, we keep touching the absence of it in its memory. I am sure i will keep adjusting my glasses even if i switch to contact lens. However adamant the present is, in telling us that it has always been this way, our habits, our feelings will all give it away. We do not feel empty for nothing. We feel empty because of the memory of having been full once. If feelings disappear, biology will remind us, once in a while. Atavism exists for a reason. And i am sure the word wouldn't have existed in Newspeak. 

Here is an instance of how authoritarian rule favours certain stereotypes even about appearance. 

How easy it was, thought Winston, if you did not look about you, to believe that the physical type set up by the Party as an ideal—tall muscular youths and deep-bosomed maidens, blond-haired, vital, sunburnt, carefree—existed and even predominated. Actually, so far as he could judge, the majority of people in Airstrip One were small, dark, and ill-favored.

And here is the Catch 22 about rebellion in the context of the working class in Oceania. 

Until they become conscious they will never rebel, and until after they have rebelled they cannot become conscious. 

Want to see an amazing metaphor? Here. 

It was like a single equation with two unknowns.

Truly, how does one find out what x and y is if we only know that x + y = 8. But to think of it while writing fiction and to use it as a metaphor, that's the writer i want to be. Or marry. Sigh. This is not the only time he uses science and math to prove a point beautifully. Look at this one here. 

like a fossil bone which turns up in the wrong stratum and destroys a geological theory.

I cannot begin to describe how lovely this comparison is. This is what i want to be. How utterly masochistic it would be, to be that fossil that destroys everything everyone believes in. I want to make an entire thriller film on this. People in quest of this fossil so that the theories that took years to prove can remain intact. It reminds me of her. She was always that fossil. Destroying theories with sometimes just as much as a sigh or a yawn and an innocent giggle afterwards.
  
Have you thought of how some songs will remind us of a past that we were not even part of? Not even heard of through stories? I think that's what songs are there for anyway. Like how a simple rhyme reminds Winston of an old London. 

Oranges and lemins, say the bells of St. Clement's, You owe me three farthings, say the bells of St. Martin's! It was curious, but when you said it to yourself you had the illusion of actually hearing bells, the bells of a lost London that still existed somewhere or other, disguised and forgotten.

And if you want to see the most beautiful use of the most famous three words in the history of humankind, It's in this book. Where the piece of paper reads,

I love you

And that's the beauty of it. You are too immersed in the environment and the ambience of fear that something that would otherwise have been your first guess at what was in the paper is the last thing you think of now. And when it comes, it comes as a blow. You feel the fire Winston is feeling in his stomach. 

And reminding us that love is the same everywhere, 

Then the memory of her face came back, and with it a raging, intolerable desire to be alone.

But at the last moment, while the crowd still hemmed them in, her hand felt for his and gave it a fleeting squeeze.

With hands locked together, invisible among the press of bodies, they stared steadily in front of them, and instead of the eyes of the girl, the eyes of the aged prisoner gazed mournfully at Winston out of nests of hair.

And Orwell confirmed what i had feared. In tumultuous times, love becomes political. I am not sure if i like love like that. I like it when it's stupid and silly.   

But you could not have pure love or pure lust nowadays. No emotion was pure, because everything was mixed up with fear and hatred. Their embrace had been a battle, the climax a victory. It was a blow struck against the Party. It was a political act. 
    
He wished that he were walking through the streets with her just as they were doing now, but openly and without fear, talking of trivialities and buying odds and ends for the household. He wished above all that they had some place where they could be alone together without feeling the obligation to make love every time they met.

How are slogans the same everywhere? Doesn't this easily remind Indians of the RSS war cry: Desh ke gaddaron ko. Goli maaro saalon ko. 

“Death to the traitors!”

And the following passage is reminiscent of every speech a typical BJP leader like Ajay Bisht gives. 

His voice, made metallic by the amplifiers, boomed forth an endless catalogue of atrocities, massacres, deportations, lootings, rapings, torture of prisoners, bombing of civilians, lying propaganda, unjust aggressions, broken treaties. It was almost impossible to listen to him without being first convinced and then maddened. At every few moments the fury of the crowd boiled over and the voice of the speaker was drowned by a wild beastlike roaring that rose uncontrollably from thousands of throats. The most savage yells of all came from the schoolchildren.

   
Orwell's descriptions are the best. It's so apt. Not a word more than required. Not a word less. See here. 

It was like struggling with some crushing physical task, something which one had the right to refuse and which one was nevertheless neurotically anxious to accomplish.

Some thoughts from the revolutionary book of which mere possession was a crime. 

an all-round increase in wealth threatened the destruction—indeed, in some sense was the destruction—of a hierarchical society. 

For if leisure and security were enjoyed by all alike, the great mass of human beings who are normally stupefied by poverty would become literate and would learn to think for themselves; and when once they had done this, they would sooner or later realize that the privileged minority had no function, and they would sweep it away. In the long run, a hierarchical society was only possible on a basis of poverty and ignorance.

This is true about all forms of oppression like caste or gender.   

And when the government faces a crisis as to what to do with the produced goods, they engage in war. Constant. Like how we have constant military threats and operations whenever the government is questioned. 

Goods must be produced, but they need not be distributed. And in practice the only way of achieving this was by continuous warfare.

War is a way of shattering to pieces, or pouring into the stratosphere, or sinking in the depths of the sea, materials which might otherwise be used to make the masses too comfortable, and hence, in the long run, too intelligent. 

War is a way of shattering to pieces, or pouring into the stratosphere, or sinking in the depths of the sea, materials which might otherwise be used to make the masses too comfortable, and hence, in the long run, too intelligent. 

War, it will be seen, not only accomplishes the necessary destruction, but accomplishes it in a psychologically acceptable way. In principle it would be quite simple to waste the surplus labor or the world by building temples and pyramids, by digging holes and filling them up again, or even by producing vast quantities of goods and then setting fire to them. But this would provide only the economic and not the emotional basis for a hierarchical society.

And science and technology will naturally become the enemies of such a state. The only exception will be when it can be used to wage bigger wars. 

The empirical method of thought, on which all the scientific achievements of the past were founded, is opposed to the most fundamental principles of Ingsoc. And even technological progress only happens when its products can in some way be used for the diminution of human liberty.    

Words written about the Big Brother are so reminiscent of Narendra Modi or Donald Trump. 

His function is to act as a focusing point for love, fear, and reverence, emotions which are more easily felt toward an individual than toward an organization.  

And here is something that reminded me of the success of BJP over Congress, explaining it through another lens. 

The essence of oligarchical rule is not father-to-son inheritance, but the persistence of a certain world-view and a certain way of life, imposed by the dead upon the living.
  
The signs of fascism as explained by crimestop 

Crimestop means the faculty of, stopping short, as though by instinct, at the threshold of any dangerous thought. It includes the power of not grasping analogies, of failing to perceive logical errors, of misunderstanding the simplest arguments if they are inimical to Ingsoc, and of being bored or repelled by any train of thought which is capable of leading in a heretical direction.

Orwell goes on to say that it is therefore, 'protective stupidity'. By the time i reached this portion of the book, i had been accused of the same. 'You are pretending to be stupid,' she had said over and over again making me doubt myself, pushing me down a spiral of darkness where i was being told that everything i did was a pretense. And yet, even after using all the faculties of thought available to me, i couldn't see how i was doing anything i was being accused of, making me doubt myself even more. 

Everything started with one of my stupid Facebook posts. After i posted it, i got calls. Messages from the two of them. We had been working together on my feature film script for some time. He had said he would produce the film. She was the one who first thought it was something worth being made. She and i used to polish the script together. I was, before it all began, working on a draft. Was writing a little every day. I say a little because usually when i write after the urge, i write a lot. This time, i had to force myself and i was amazed at how little i was able to write when it had to be forced. I had just postponed a trip to Kerala for research for the film because of Corona outbreak. Ironically, the post was about the virus.   

They said my post was a replica of a script he was working on and i had knowledge of. I had read the treatment of something called the pilot episode. They said that with the material i had access to, it was impossible that i thought of what i wrote on my own, it was an exact copy of his script . I didn't think so. Not even a bit. I saw no relation. That infuriated them more. I started panicking. I couldn't see what was happening. I didn't understand why two people who used to be friends were telling me terrible things about me. I wanted it to stop. I asked him what it was that he wanted. I took down the post. I wrote up lines saying i was sorry, that it was his idea and copyrighted material that i wrote in my post. He said my note sounded coercive. I changed the lines to something that wouldn't sound coercive. All that content writing experience paid off. He asked to run my note by his lawyer. I did that and sent it in an e-mail. Like how he wanted. It said i was sorry it happened that i didn't know what i was thinking, putting up his script idea in a facebook post like that. 

After sending it, i got a minor panic attack. It was arguably the first time in my life that i wrote and sent something i did not believe a word of. It felt horrible. I wanted to take the pill prescribed to me for such times. It was the first time such a situation arose. I couldn't move and just kept crying. I didn't want to start another pill habit. Something told me this wasn't going to stop. More attacks would come. 

I wrote to her. I asked her if she thought what they said of me was true. I didn't know what to do. She and i weren't talking but it seemed to me like it was the end of my life. And i always wrote to her at the end of my life. I showed her the material i was accused of plagiarising in my facebook post and my post itself. She didn't tell me what she thought but said that i just had to tell them i didn't think it was plagiarism if i didn't think so. Wasn't that what i did and what infuriated them so much? They wanted me to say that it was an exact copy. How could i say that when i didn't think so. I wrote to Han, Calico and asked them all if i was wrong in this matter. If they too thought i had stolen someone's idea and wrote a silly facebook post.

He called me again, first asking me if i was not feeling well. I had violated some Non Disclosure Agreement by sharing it with a third party he said. Tell me who you shared it with, he kept asking. I told him about Han because i thought that was what he was talking about. Don't lie to me, tell me who else, he kept asking. I was scared. What was he doing? Why was he talking like that? I fumbled and said no one. He later called me a liar for saying that. 'It doesn't matter if you were scared. The fact is that you are a liar,' he yelled on a video call. 

Three therapy sessions costing a total of Rs. 5800 have passed and the impact this had on me is still there. I still dream of it. Think about it obsessively. How i should have refused to write a note i didn't believe in. All those things i should have said to point out how what was being done was wrong and terrible. Which is perhaps why the interrogation of Winston had a cathartic effect on me. he had to say 2+2=5 at the end of it. I had to say i had copied something i did not copy. 

No, there was no physical pain that was inflicted on me. And i agree with Winston. 

Nothing in the world was so bad as physical pain.

I have experienced both. And in both, what i do is cower and agree to whatever is being said so that the terrible pain stops. Emotional pain is different, but it hurts just the same. I get overwhelmed just the same. I just want it to end. They told me that all i wanted was to emerge out of a problem unscathed, i just wanted to be the helpless victim - powerless. All i wanted was them to stop. 

“How does one man assert his power over another, Winston?”

asks O'Brien to Winston. 

Winston thought “By making him suffer,” he said. “Exactly. By making him suffer. Obedience is not enough. Unless he is suffering, how can you be sure that he is obeying your will and not his own? Power is in inflicting pain and humiliation. Power is in tearing human minds to pieces and putting them together again in new shapes of your own choosing.

I have a long road ahead of me. I have to learn how not to cower in fear and anxiety and say the answer that is being asked of me. However scary it is, however painful the questions are, however big i think the interrogators are, i have to stay put. Most people know how to do it when it is people we hate or have ideological differences with. I do. But the challenge is to do the same with people we love and agree with on most grounds. That's the long road ahead of me. 1984 was just the terrifying beginning of it.