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mmmmalo · 5 years

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Some Words on Openbound

This is a step towards a more comprehensive account of A6I3 (Openbound). The basic idea: Meenah’s interactive adventures can be read as a dream-sequence from Roxy’s point of view expressing the following motifs:

The threat posed by (Lord) English functions as a metastasized metaphor for problems posed by language itself.

To escape from the clutches of language is to achieve perfect communication, represented by a return to a pre-lingual, child-like state (“pre-lingual” at once referring to image, sensation, and silence)

The recurring motif of 'merging with child’ is also used to a. to express the desire for pregnancy b. to express the desire to become one’s True Self, conceptualized as an inner, child-self that is “born” within oneself like an embryo c. to express pedophilia

First: Meenah is Roxy’s doppelganger. When we are introduced to Roxy’s fenestrated planes, we are promptly informed that if someone were caught half in/out one of the windows when the power cuts off, the poor soul would be sliced in two (4510). By Chekhov’s gun, this introduction ought to result in someone getting gorily bisected by the window, but it never happens. Instead we get this:

Gcat warps the panel away, trapping Roxy in the void, and we are shown a bisected horse puppet (left). The half-horse reiterates the looming threat of Chekhov’s guillotine. Roxy’s body is intact, but the scenery suggests she ought to be split. The suggestion is followed by the initial appearance of Meenah (right), implying that Meenah herself is a piece of Roxy, snipped away and running rampant. Thus, a doppelganger.

So, taking Meenah to be a esoteric mirror of Roxy, it follows that her adventures in the dreams bubbles are a narrative frame for /Roxy’s/ dreams. This is the basic assumption of everything that follows.

1: Language is the enemy.

Time is an impermeable barrier. It ticks on irreversibly, edging its victims unto entropic dissolution. The Lord of Time and the destruction he brings embody the inevitability of death. Aradia cracks a joke about this at the beginning of Openbound: within the ageless confine of the dreambubbles, “time is a figure of speech”, she says. Though ostensibly asserting the endless flexibility of time, an alternate interpretation would indicate that Lord English, time, and language itself are apprehended on similar terms. The most useful one presently: language, like time, is regarded as a barrier.

Throughout Homestuck, characters struggle with abstractions, beginning with the frustrating data mechanics of the sylladex and culminating in various tightrope-walks along unorthodox configurations of space and time. Language numbers among the headaches: Caliborn characterizes the text he reads as “walls”, further declaring them to be “impenetrable” and “migraine-inducing”. On one level, this aligns with Caliborn’s statement that the kids talk/think too much and he’d like them to just GET THE FuCK ON WITH IT ALREADY: speech is an obstacle towards both the completion of the kids’ objectives and Caliborn’s attainment of what he wants. On another level, this aligns with the later discussion of Caliborn’s learning disability: in all likelihood, he has difficulty reading. Another example of this disdain for language is Jade, who, in her rapturous treatise on the wonders of anthro, answers the call of the wild by renouncing words.

No need to answer. Words slough from the busy mind like a useless dead membrane as a more visceral sapience takes over. Something simpler is in charge now, a force untouched by the concerns and burdens of the upright, that farcical yoke the bipedal tow. It now drives you through the midnight brush, your paws whisking through creepers, unearthing with each bold stomp bright odors demanding investigation.

Just prior to Openbound, the sentiments expressed above (that language is unnecessary, an obstacle to unmediated communication and pure sensation) are restated in mythic terms: REALITY ITSELF is being DESTROYED by (LORD) ENGLISH! Language the inhibitor of direct experience becomes language the rot of the universe, language the malevolent destroyer of the capacity for any experience at all.

Meenah witnesses English’s destruction of reality and rushes off to recruit soldiers to fight him. There is harmony between the imminent threat of English and the gameplay: the primary obstacles to Meenah’s objectives are words. Literal walls of text stand between you and the end of the level, as you must navigate exhausting conversations to satisfy the game’s win conditions. Within the conversation themselves, the motif persists by showcasing various ways that speech can obscure meaning.

Kankri couches his points in overly ornate terminology and uses social justice as a tool for settling personal disputes. Latula laments how her commitment to her RAD speech affectations and persona can make her harder to understand. Cronus trips over his own accent, Mituna tumbles through various word spasms. Meulin’s deafness is thematically succeeded by Rufioh’s inability to communicate his unhappiness to the Horuss, who has sweat in his ears. The two characters who you cannot understand at all, the silent Kurloz and the pseudo-Japanese speaking Damara, are revealed to be direct servants of Lord English! Failure to communicate – inability to bridge the barrier of language – is the enemy.

The counter to the hyperbolic threat of language-as-mediation and is a fantasy of perfect communication. In Jade’s scenario, attainment of this ideal is presented visually as Jade acquiring the superficial markers of a wolf (“Wouldn't these ears suit you? Would not this proud long snout assist you in the hunt?”), whereupon she acquires the rich experience that she associates with the idea of animal, unmediated by language. Just as Jade merges with the image of a wolf, there is an image in Openbound that Meenah seeks, the attainment of which embodies the goal of some idealized communication, without words.

The image is that of childhood.

2: Kankri and Porrim form a spectrum of identity

In Homestuck, desire is generally structured as the restoration of a lost unity. Consider Cherub reproduction, itself inspired by a Platonic model of love: in seeking a soulmate, one is actually seeking a fascimile of their lost half, that with which they were originally united. The force that fractures this unity -- the boundary that prohibits access to the desired object -- is the law.

I elaborate on the various corollaries of this motif elsewhere (x)(x), but for present purposes, let it suffice to say that time itself functions as a law of sorts, insofar as time rips you away from childhood and bars the possibility of a return.

That’s a little abstract, so here’s an example: due to the the status of trolls as manifestations, we know that the characters Meenah visits in the afterlife are expressions of her (and thus Roxy’s) psyche. This relationship is difficult to map on a troll-by-troll basis. But things begin to click when you view each cluster of interactions with Beforan trolls as a mental constellation, their interplay showcasing pervasive internal dialogues and dynamics.

In the first cluster, Latula appears between Porrim and Kankri because SHE IS THE LAW, dividing Jesus from Mary, Child from Mother (which, as I will show, seems to be the trajectory Roxy imagines for herself). This is the reason that Latula successfully interrupts Kankri and Karkat’s “conversation”: they are clones, more or less, and the law is that which divides the child from itself.

I don’t claim Kankri represents a child just because he’s a brat who gets ruthlessly mothered by Porrim: it’s also implicit in his politics. Humans are not stratified by blood color, so the hemospectrum is not directly analogous to any real life example of power, privilege, or what have you. Neither is it perfectly generic. In a given context, the hemospectrum is often analogized to some particular notion of hierarchy. Eridan’s drive for blood purity marks him as a analogous to a racial supremacist; the depiction of Zebruh’s attitude towards low bloods is well interpreted as being rooted in a particularly exploitative brand of misogyny (x); and Kankri’s polemics pivot upon the particular role that AGE DIFFERENCE plays in structural oppression of Alternia, a metaphor for what is popularly termed “adultism”, injustices stemming from the power adults hold over children.

Kankri emphasizes that the lifespan discrepancy between warm and cool hemochroma means the upper classes are allotted far more time (unto eons) to consolidate power and define cultural norms; their immense lifespans constitute a structural basis for the oppression of lowbloods, whose relative youth means less time to organize. This doubles as a description of a political limitation of children, relative to adults. Kankri describes the lowest grouping of blood colors as Burgundy, Ochre, Umber, and Yellow -- BUOY for short, which not coincidentally is Meenah’s nautical permutation of BOY. All of which is to say that Kankri rankling at Porrim’s doting is mutually analogous with his politics, in the context of Beforus, where coddling is the de facto relation between castes. His being a brat raging against an overbearing mother is an analogy.

And funny enough, that’s something he and Porrim have in common, in a way. Porrim balks at the /role/ of motherhood expected of her, among other injustices upon women in Beforan society. And Porrim likewise objects to the role of RAD GIRL that Latula 'pro+jects’, encouraging her to just ‘be yo+urself’... the idea being, in the same sense that Latula’s GAME GIRL persona masks her ‘real’ personality, femininity itself is construed as a shell encasing the ‘true’ child-self within. Or rather, the feminine persona is portrayed as being pregnant with the child-self, which is the true self. So Kankri’s raging against Porrim is a metaphor for a spirit balking at the gendered expectations that encase them.

If I can speak with any confidence on this psychological reading of Kankri and Porrim’s opposition, it because the invocation of pregnancy to communicate as sense of inner/outer self is repeated throughout the dream, through the language used to describe characters who are otherkin. Take Cronus for example: he is named after a god famous for devouring his children. And his lusus (an expression of his desire) is a seahorse, notable for their child-bearing males. The net effect is the impression of a baby in Cronus’s belly -- but instead of literal pregnancy, we see Cronus describe himself as ‘a human “born” in the body of a troll’, essentially invoking the image of pregnancy to communicate his status as humankin.

Here you might begin to see how this is Roxy’s dream -- the mental conflict between Porrim (womanhood) and Kankri (childhood, which while ostensibly gender neutral can be rendered masculine by opposition to womanhood) creates a spectrum of identity available to Roxy, as made explicit by their gender exploration in the epilogues. This seems to be the joke at play whenever Latula reiterates the “GIRLS RULE, BOYS DROOL” line from her theme song: taken literally, it is a succinct summary of the Kankri/Porrim conflict, wherein the feminine persona is construed as dominating the (at times masculine by contrast) child-self.

Kankri’s description of a “warm-identifying physically-cooler caste” is Roxy: she identifies with her child-self.

And as I mentioned before, just as Latula stands between Porrim and Kankri, time is the law separating someone feeling trapped by femininity from a childhood where such concerns were nonexistent. Time is thus the enemy, which is one of the thematic reasons the Lord of Time warrants such resentment. A certain longing for childhood also characterizes the glimpses of John that punctuates Openbound: he laments the inability to recapture the feeling of watching Con Air with his Dad when he was younger (throwing his big tantrum at the exact moment that Cyrus threatens the bunny, which really ought to go back in the box, the perfectly generic object). Roxy later voices a similar sentiment in Wizardy Herbert via Beatrix, who would “trade all the badges in the world to go back to when things were simpler.” Elsewhere in the story Roxy emphasizes a growing tension between a figure with ~100 merit badges (symbolizing complexity) with another character, Russet (an apple, the emblem of atomic simplicity, as per drunk!Rose). Kanaya might describe this as a tension between Space and Time (1093), but here it chiefly serves to further underline the Child and Adult distinction.

3: The corollary of “perfect communication” is silence.

If Time divides the child from itself, it can be hypothesized that Lord English can embody this divide in his other symbolic functions, such as his embodiment of language. If true, it follows that the union of the child-self represents perfect, unmediated communication. Our first example of such a union then are the enmeshed Vantases (who are basically clones) -- but instead of some transcendent transmission of thought, we see an endless one-sided lecture. Spoonful after heaping spoonful of heaving diarhetoric fed directly into Karkat’s gaping earhole.

And on a psychological level, perhaps that’s an apt description of what it means to “just be yourself” without interruption, no commentary or insecure protests interjecting their way into your stream of consciousness. Ordering yourself around without a second thought. And I’ve been in the zone in that way, where I’m so immersed in a task that the task becomes me. But on an interpersonal level, it’s clear that “perfect” speech is entirely unequal.

Despite ostensibly championing the rights of children in the face of domination, Kankri asserts himself as the “teacher” to Karkat’s “pupil”, assuming that the transmission of truth will be one-sided. When confronted by Porrim about this hypocrisy, Kankri defensively insists that he is having a “man to man conversation” with Karkat, an equal exchange. (And oddly, even as she advocates for Karkat, Porrim leaves Karkat in his silence, gently assuring him that his dejected glance has said all he needs to say...)

At any rate, the Karkat-Kankri dynamic illustrates that the immediacy of communication within the primordial union brings with it an element of domination. The subsequent pairings (Cronus-Mituna and Kurloz-Meulin) elaborate on problems and abuses that can accompany compromised speech and silence, each section emphasizing a particular child symbol: respectively, angels and cats (which I’ve established previously).

Angels first: Cronus’s claim that “as a wwingman [Mituna] is a total disgrace” uses “wingman” to invoke the image of angels. This method is repeated by Lil Hal, who observes that Dirk views him as a “counterproductive wing man”, to which Dirk sarcastically replies “nice deduction Lil Einstein”. The reference to the Disney Jr. show neatly ties the angel reference into the fact that as Dirk’s creation, in a sense Hal can be considered Dirk’s child. And in the same way that Hal (the child/angel) functions partly as a reflection of Dirk’s own nature, Mituna’s angel status indicates that he can function symbolically as Cronus’s “inner-child”, the self with which one is pregnant.xx

Silence is an interminable pregnancy. Not speaking means not birthing the baby, not letting the angel fall to earth. The hush is a measure against the corruption and ruin associated with English. (Even though the silent characters are his most devoted servants?)

Cronus demonstrates this with the command “vwait here, try not to fall dowvn, and ABOVWE ALL, try not to be seen” in which “above all” doubles as the place from which Mituna is falling. Language is the instrument of descent, Mituna’s garbled speech emphasizes his “fallen” status within the paradigm. Cronus “really hates the sound of” Mituna partly because he views Mituna as a caricature of himself, again not unlike Dirk’s violent rejection of the negative qualities he identifies in Hal.

This is why Cronus’s opening gesture is to fail a tongue-twister and cry GLOBES in exasperation: it is as though he has hit a snag in his verbal kick-flip and face-planted onto the earth (the globe) -- Mituna bombing his literal stunts and falling down being the root visual. Skateboards (and other 4-wheel devices) are vehicles unto “unreal air”: a status of immaculate lofty ideality, and thus untouchable and pure. The other skateboarder, Latula, made a point of emphasizing her untouchability as she performed some “objectively rad” tricks for Kankri. And more to the point, Latula claims that her intuitions “just make sense” and explaining them would not be "radical”, saying in her own way that bringing her feelings/intuitive knowledge into the realm of speech would in some way tarnish or degrade them. “4 grlz gott4 s4cr1f1c3 und3rst4nd4b1l1ty for th3 s4k3 of r4dn3ss” she says.

Another way to put it is that not expressing a thought can make seem invincible -- it cannot be exposed to the risk of contradiction or mockery. A relevant quote:

MEENAH: i heard a rumor you think youre a human now MEENAH: that true

CRONUS: its a privwate matter. i dont see vwhy i should havwe to talk about it vwith you, and open myself up to more of your judgmental scorn.

MEENAH: sounds like another desperate cry for attention imo

(Aside: an old friend of mine faced almost this exact conversation on facebook when they came out as a trans man, so this one actually hit home a little bit.)

Roxy’s sensitivity to the reactions of others is perhaps implicit in the paranoid staring contests with the void, but in relation to their gender expression, it becomes most explicit in the epilogue -- not only in the faltering manner by which Roxy begins to assert their gender expression, but in the narration itself. Although Dirk’s narration seems to largely reflection his own hesitation to embrace Roxy’s newfound identity, it should be remembered that he is effectively Roxy’s brainghost when narrating their thoughts. That is to say, Dirk’s reaction to Roxy is symbiotic with what Roxy imagines Dirk’s reaction would be. The mockery in the narration is the mockery Roxy expects and fears. Thus, Roxy’s level of comfort and security with their current gender expression necessarily coincides with the level of ease expressed by Dirk’s later narration.

But let’s return to Openbound.

The traumatic deafening of Meulin is analogous to the deathening of Jaspers: one is blasted with the violent shriek of a clown, the other sassacrushed by the “daunting text” of Mark Twain. With the cat as a symbol of the child-self, the message is basically that the child’s encounter with language is a violent experience. (Lord English is destroying reality, etc etc) Kankri neatly echoes this point of view by announcing one of his lectures as “my crushing harangue 9n this delicate su6ject” -- to rephrase, he is crushing the delicate subject (child) with his harangue.

Like much violence in Homestuck, violence of speech is sexualized. There is a moment where Cronus openly relishes the unilateral communication first displayed in the Kankri > Karkat pipeline. He basks in the fact that Mituna is incapable of repeating anything coherently, or that Mituna’s word is otherwise held in such disrepute that no one will take Mituna seriously. As Cronus does this, Mituna laments that Cronus is touching him and will not stop.

The bad-touch motif continues with Kurloz and Meulin, who achieve their own mode of “perfect communication” (union with child-self) via streams of wordless, emotive images. In the above exchange, Kurloz mimes an Ewok rubbing a child, to which Meulin responds with a small frown and a laughing Sailor Moon, as if to convey that she were the one being tickled in the previous gif. She slams the UNSEE button to emphasize her displeasure. (It is only after this sequence that we learn Kurloz can control Meulin’s mind, further linking harmonious union with tyrannical, unilateral communication)

It’s worth noting here that Meenah’s goal in parts 1 & 2 is to get through gates established by Karkat, ultimately convincing him to join up with her. Karkat who, alongside Kankri, currently represents the child-self. Just as Rufioh interprets Meenah’s invitation to join as a romantic proposal, Meenah interprets her successful recruitment of Karkat as a date, sealing the euphemism by reassuring her recruit that he “will not regret hitchin [his] wagon to [her] starfish”, which is a sex joke. The undertones of age disparity later surface as Meenah joins up with her second Vriska (x):

MEENAH: can i ask a kinda personal question MEENAH: i mean not even that personal but whatev

VRISKA: Sure...?

MEENAH: how old are you

VRISKA: Uh, VRISKA: Almost seven and a half sweeps. VRISKA: Getting close to eight!!!!!!!! VRISKA: I pro8a8ly sound like a fucking nerd, 8ut I've 8een excited a8out reaching that milestone pretty much my whole life.

MEENAH: 7.5 huh MEENAH: i guess thats a lil more respectable

VRISKA: More respecta8le than what?

MEENAH: nofin

For Roxy, the libidinal investment in kids is confined to subtext for basically the whole story: jokes about the speculative mechanics of boning chess people and elves, the sexual tension between Russet and the boy with 100 merit badges, the time Roxy was briefly upset to learn she had been “flirt-larping” with a 13 year old Dirk, only to resume the game a page later -- little moments. In the epilogues, Roxy being highly conscious of her interactions with children and the potential for reproducing systems of domination seems embedded in her trepidation towards any of the players governing the world they created (a hands-off attitude toward parenting that may also offer some rationale for Mom’s neglect of Rose, if all that is true of Roxy holds true for her past self).

But let’s move forward.

4: To See Oneself as a Host Plush

I’d like to reiterate here that the Kankri-Porrim dichotomy suggests that the categories of ‘baby’ and ‘boy’ are blurred in their mutual opposition to ‘girl’. Again, the letter of the law: BOYS DROOL! This offers a rationale for oddities like Roxy wiping John’s mouth for him during their date in Candy (boys drool), or this little slip-of-the-tongue which I wouldn’t quite call subtle:

ROXY: doin ok up there b?

JOHN: i’m fine!!! JOHN: wait. b?

ROXY: yea like short for babe ROXY: cuz ur my babe b

JOHN: oh, haha. right.

If we’re being less charitable, you could characterize this as Roxy keeping her eyes on the prize -- as though in addressing John, she is actually addressing the baby that he can provide her. And while I’m not certain of that, the notion of such double-speak (seemingly addressing the person in front of you when you are actually addressing an unborn child) is crucial for understanding the metaphors embedded in the Damara-Rufioh-Horuss triad.

The motif of pregnancy is here introduced via Fiduspawn: impregnate the host plush and a baby pony comes out.

You might remember that Rufioh refers to girls as ‘doll’ -- this quirk links the host plush to the feminine (at least within the context of this dream). To be more precise, the doll is characterized as a void that invites (or even demands) filling: this is a complementary reading of Horuss’s claim that Rufioh “stole his breath away”, synonymous with the claim that Rufioh “has a way of drawing the breath out of people”. The Rogue of Breath has difficulty standing up for himself (Horuss calls it “affable pliability”), so Horuss often speaks over him or on his behalf, as though Rufioh were a marionette. Horuss is saying that Rufioh’s passive demeanor invites this sort of behavior, that Rufioh’s effective silence means he is “asking for it”, to use a loaded phrase.

How funny then that the “doll” of their group Damara (whose name means Silence) is literally “asking for it”, constantly. The same logic applies to Dirk’s decapitated head (from just before this intermission!) and Vriska’s comatose body -- through narrative contrivance, each voiceless vessel hauntingly implores a living Page to kiss them, to fill them with a Breath from without. The sequences suggest a conviction on the part of the kissers: that which is “empty” must desire to be “filled”, a framing that becomes particularly unpleasant when sexualized.

What Damara is asking for is ambiguous, at once referring to sex and the child to which sex serves as vehicle (among other potentials). I wrote awhile back (x) that Mom gave Jaspers an ostentatious burial as a proxy mourning for a miscarried child that preceded Rose, and her cat-cloning was oriented towards the eventual revival of her lost baby. For Damara (and thus Roxy) this becomes a fundamental myth: the desire for children is complemented in intensity by the conviction that the child has already been lost, or stolen from you. Horuss observes that Damara’s remarks a leaning “bloo” because (it’s a pun) her dirty talk is tinged with mourning. There is, inexplicably, sorrow when Damara says she wants to feel her nipples between your teeth. She’s not talking to you -- she’s talking to the baby.

This is also the joke when Latula/Terezi threaten to kill Damara for approaching Mituna/Karkat: the LAW will not permit you to access BABY! You may not recover your child or your childhood, time has barred you from both. (Though of course, through the pedophilia lens this becomes much less sympathetic).

A similar moment can be read into Horuss: Kankri, like all trolls, acts as a manifestation of some emotional surge, so Kankri’s sudden appearance implies that someone is legitimately triggered, despite the comic’s apparent commitment to denigrating his point of view. Like Cronus, Horuss’s horse-kin status entails an identification with his inner (child) self -- but the trans allegory melds seamlessly into other modes of union with the child image, such as pregnancy. So when Kankri asks Horuss to confirm that he is triggered by Meenah’s skepticism towards his identity, the reply “Trigger sounds like a wonderful name for a hoofbeast” is not merely a flippant non-sequitur, but also another echo of the core lamentation, a wistful musing on names for a dead/unborn child.

A brief step backwards: at the beginning, we outlined how Lord English’s destruction of reality was (in the present context at least) a mythic expression of fears and frustrations about communication and speech. Dissatisfaction /produced/ a fantasy individual to whom the problem could be sourced and blamed assigned. A similar attitude should be adopted in examining Damara’s theft of Rufioh’s “happy thought” Tinkerbull -- she represents an already existing discontentment with his circumstances, crystallized into an individual.

This is where Damara would seem to slot into the dysphoria proceedings: she crushed Tinkerbull with a refrigerator, a reprisal of the sassacrushing of Jaspers. The refrigerator is a womb symbol (I insist), suggesting that the womb is a hostile force on par with the Law of English (Girls Rule!). From the perspective of Mom, this could be read a response to her miscarriage, a result of blaming her own body for the child’s death. From Roxy’s perspective, it might be better characterized as ‘the body itself is a domineering force suffocating my child self’ -- and thus dysphoria. Damara crushing Tinkerbull represents the sense that your own body is a meat prison, a shell imprisoning (if not outright killing) your happiness.

This is why Damara manifests for Kanaya, who struggles to reconcile herself with Porrim, a daunting image of ideal womanhood, especially as it concerns the care of matriorb (ie motherhood). Porrim assures her that even though motherhood is to some degree a societal imposition, a role, this does not mean Kanaya cannot embrace the perpetuation of her species on her own terms. This is a good lesson, and Kanaya agrees -- but there stands Damara regardless, joy-stealer, lingering discomfort with self-conception as a host plush. “Just ignore her until she goes away” is all the advice Porrim has to offer on the subject.

(Passing thought: It occurs to me that the phrase ‘happy thought’ used to describe Tinkerbull could be replaced with ‘euphoria’, forming a clean complement to ‘dysphoria’... but wordplay reliant on a missing link is somewhat suspect, so let’s leave that one in the margins)

5: High Euphemistic Density

Let’s review by playing with some euphemisms in Horuss’s opening address to Meenah. I’m dividing his words into 3 sections for ease of reference:

1 HORUSS: 8=D < Your Harness... I mean Hayness. Highness I mean. HORUSS: 8=D < F*DDLEST*%. Please pardon my utterly e%ecrable language, and unforgivable stammering, your Horseness. #Sh*ot! #I mean Hayness! #Whew. 2 HORUSS: 8=D < I am a bale of nerves in your royal presence, and it has been so long. 3 HORUSS: 8=D < And when I am so spooked, you must know how that causes me to even more firmly identify with the majestic hoofbeast.

Starting with three: recall, “girls rule”. Femininity is characterized as a daunting (or even domineering) imposition. Kanaya displaying anxiety at the prospect of measuring up to the image of Porrim is one way this motif crystallizes into a character dynamic. Another way seems to be Horuss’s anxiety before his empress -- just as Kankri (child) rebels against Porrim (mother), the presence of Meenah (mother) induces Horuss to identify with the hoofbeast (baby). Both cases present a shrinking away from a feminine authority figure as metaphor for rejection of the societal strictures of femininity.

Two is a dick joke: while Horuss is ostensibly lamenting his anxiety, a penis is a literal ‘bale of nerves’, a sensory cluster. “It has been so long.” The pun is reinforced as the expense of Rufioh, who apparently did not have ‘the nerve’ to ‘finish [Damara] off’ on her quest bed, which is an innuendo for sexual inadequacy. That Horuss’s smiling face emoji is itself a dick suggests a conflation of identification with his happy thoughts and identification with the member -- which, based on previous discussion of Tinkerbull, would seem to blur the line between having a dick and being pregnant? Which aligns with the notion that pregnancy becomes a metaphor for masculine identification via union with the child self.

(“You very nearly caught a glimpse of a horse penis and began to cry” conveys a mournful yearning of the same order as “I want to feel my nipples between your teeth”?)

But the metaphor goes both ways: the brain is another ‘bale of nerves’, thus offering a rational for Mituna’s presence on the outskirts of the dream. His fall from the brain tree strikes me as less an ejaculation (from brain-dick) as birth (from brain-womb) -- hence the use of Mituna as the lost child, forever denied to Damara by the law (Latula).

And we arrive at one, which repeats a bit from Cronus’s introduction: Horuss trips over his own speech, illustrating the Fall. Just as Cronus attempts to silence Mituna to avoid the embarrassment expected to accompany self-expression, Horuss attempts to c*nsor himself before the judgement of his empress. The need to hide himself (as the stoic smile might indicate) is also embedded in the way Horuss describes his mouth as a load-gaper, and begs pardon for his potty-mouth: silence is golden, and conversely speech becomes excrable, fallen and profaned.

(Silly thought: on occasion, censorship can also designate the holy, eg censoring the name of G*d so as not to besmirch it. That in mind, I find it amusing to take Roxy’s line “holiest of shits // the shit.... // is down right // SACROSANCT” as a literal deification of excrement, making Horuss and Rufioh’s self-censorship look like a last ditch attempt at keeping the angel-child up in heaven. No?)

6: Conclusions and Questions

Obviously, this isn’t all that can be said of Openbound -- people have written extensive character studies of the alpha trolls, mined their stories for clues and parallels to less tangential plot-lines, and otherwise made whatever sense could be made of things. My contribution is some words on the mixed metaphors, word play, and psychological motifs that surround the proceedings.

If you, like me, are frazzled by the sheer density of double and triple speak at play, this is the gist of what I’m arguing for:

“Merge with child” seems to be the overarching motivation expressed in Openbound. But to follow that command verbatim is impossible -- the goal must be interpreted (as getting pregnant, as being true to oneself, as pederasty, as nostalgic pursuit of simplicity, etc) in order to be realized.

That the ideal merger is an image whose wholeness/breadth of possibility is lost in the specificity of actualization would seem analogous to the Fall occurring between silence and speech... so the motif persists on a meta level, maybe? But we don’t need to dwell on that more than we already have.

Instead, I’d like to end with several new points that give me pause.

It’s still not clear to me why the silent characters are the direct servants of Lord English. Communication with them is impossible, and that frustration is what causes language to be conceived as a threat in the first place, but I have an itch that tells me there’s a bit more to it than that.

I don’t know what the transmission of the codpiece has to do with anything. I suspect it may number among various metaphors for trans masculinity, but that’s confirmation bias speaking -- from the scene itself, I gathered very little.

I wonder if Aranea’s info dumps at the end are factored in... you could construe them as placing Meenah in the position of Karkat relative to Kankri -- on the receiving end of spoonful after heaping spoonful of words. So even though Karkat disappears after you follow him, you’ve nonetheless “merged” with the child-function that he performs here? But again, I worry that this sort of hasty integration means I’m missing out on new info.

I’m pretty firmly of the mind that this whole intermission is chiefly devoted to Roxy, but I do worry that Meenah’s doppelganger status could have misled me on that point. After all, Jane’s planet quest contained references to her friends desires, not only her own (x)(x) -- would it be so odd for the same to be true of Roxy’s dreams? In which case it would be worth revisiting this intermission to double-check whether any given section might map more closely to the other alpha kids -- especially since Rufioh/Horuss is a transparent commentary on Dirk/Jake

This is a good a place as any to note that when I was operating under the assumption that Roxy was a trans girl, I was inclined to read the Rufioh/Horuss break-up as ambivalence on the question of getting rid of your dick -- which seemed sensible enough at the time, though the present model seems more consistent across the various conversations. It should be noted though that the language of gender questioning can easily serve multiple directions at once. So... I guess I want to make sure the apparent success of this approach doesn’t blind me to other interpretive potentials? Fingers crossed

...there’s more things to question, probably, but I think that’s good for now.

Special thanks to @red-zora for giving this mess the once-over.

Good night everyone.

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kinetic-elaboration · 5 years

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January 27: Thoughts on The 100 2x09, Remember Me

...For some reason I was really angry at the beginning of this? Also there’s a lot of Lxa bashing. Sorry. And some Clarke criticism but in the latter case, I mean it well.

Also this is really long whoops.

So...I miss when killing off main characters was a big deal and people actually reacted to it.

I truly cannot take Lxa seriously I’m sorry. I don’t find her... intimidating at all.

I’ve already complained repeatedly about her complete bad faith deal making at every turn so I won’t go into it again but nevertheless, here she is, again, moving the goal posts of the negotiation. ‘I’ll withdraw my army if you cure the Reapers. No, if you give up your friend. No, if you give me his body.’ Clarke should have double crossed her immediately.

Also I know that I ultimately did think it was reasonable for Finn to face Grounder justice (except insofar as that justice was itself morally untenable--that is, the Torture Porn) but now that he’s dead, I think there’s no real moral argument to be made that the Grounders deserve his body. I understand their traditions, which in fact I found quite moving when I first watched this ep, but surely his people have, or could make up, some traditions for his burial also. He is still their friend. This seems like little more than an excuse to be cruel. And Clarke’s so fucking broken she just goes with it. It’s truly awful. I mean she’s doing the only thing she can do I guess but it’s laughable that she sounds as if she has any sort of upper hand, you’re getting played bitch.

(Yeah I know, Lxa is being ‘groundbreaking’ and ‘revolutionary’ by even semi-accepting capital punishment without torture and taking his body is a way of appeasing her harder line advisers but like cry me a river--she’s either the all powerful commander or she’s fucking not.)

“We want the same things.” Lol if you wanted the same things you would have stuck to the original deal. No I’m not over this at all I guess.

I also still can’t get over how Clarke has literally never earned true leadership in the eyes of her own people and yet she continues to be randomly viewed as a leader by the Grounders and thus retains pretty much full de facto control over her own people’s power structure.

Also Kane shut the fuck up. I completely forgot about this but they really did put him through an off-screen 180 where all of a sudden Lxa is a God to him and can literally do nothing wrong and to this day we have never been given an explanation how that came to be. Guess it’s easier to tell not show huh?!?

ALSO I get we’re suppose to see a sort of racism-corollary to lines like “I don’t think they know what peace is” like obviously this rubs one the wrong way automatically. But Abby’s not really wrong. And despite what Kane thinks, Lxa has given, again, NO indication at all that she is interested in peace. She has given a lot of indications that she wants to do whatever she can to wring as much from the Sky People as she can without giving anything in return and hey we’re only halfway through the season and she’s already psychologically broken Clarke (also the only person she acknowledges as the leader even though she is not, cannot emphasize this enough, the leader of anything... and thus the only person L really has to break) and sunk-cost-fallacy-ed her into submission. Now that Finn is dead Clarke would cut off her own tit to make Lxa happy because anything else is “letting him die in vain.”

...Why am I so angry lol?

I understand the positions of both Clarke and Raven in this scene, which is fucking brutal, but I sympathize more with Raven. Clarke’s basically just a messenger, but what the Grounders are demanding is (I know I already said it) cruel, and cruel to Raven above all. And Clarke is almost all business. I think that’s what she needs to be for herself but it’s not helpful to the situation.

Anyway here are my faves in Mount Weather. It’s almost hard to watch these scenes because I want to, like, memorize them. Partially for the C/M story and partially just because. Today’s adventure is getting to a radio to send a message to the Ark-wide channel, which is a term for a thing that exists. Also I forgot how snarky everyone / Miller was to Maya. Which, I get. But--are they not thinking about how her own people have experimented on her? Like she is expendable to them, this is just a known fact at this time. So yes, there is a real risk to her, Nathan.

“Oh, is that all?” / “No--there’s more.” Monty’s so one-track he didn’t even hear the sarcasm. I love him.

“Their army has been getting their ass kicked by Mount Weather forever.” Bellamy speaking the truth. Do they need the alliance, or do they just need the Grounders to back the fuck off from attacking them? (Spoiler: they do not need the alliance.)

Ah Bellarke, always quick to reassure each other. Blindly, even.

“Since I don’t take orders from you, I’m going to need a better reason” is one of my favorite lines, and underrated. Finally someone reminding Clarke she’s not actually in charge of everyone and everything all the time. (I realize this sounds like I dislike Clarke. I don’t. I just find certain traits of hers frustrating. But this just makes her a good character.) Also you can see that, rather like her moment with Raven, she falls back on being business like and direct and issuing orders to avoid talking about feelings or breaking apart.

The United States War Room survives the apocalypse.

I’m sorry but it’s ridiculous to think that Lxa invented the concept of an alliance lol.

I guess Clarke needs to go all in on the alliance because of Finn, but... I also think this is part of who she is. Her sense of practicality outweighs any human desire to hold a grudge, and I think she assumes a level of practicality in others too, automatically, such that she underestimates wariness in others. Like Bellamy and Gustus and everyone is right to be uncertain about this literally hours-old alliance--not even an official alliance, since L’s latest demand hasn’t technically been met!--and Clarke’s like ‘yeah I’ll sleep next to people who would have killed me six hours ago np!’ because now that she’s in, she’s in. She’s neither angry nor afraid.

Linctavia like “Google Earth, always taking pictures.”

Is Lincoln wearing Ark clothes?

I know Raven is made to look kind of wan and sunken and sad but yet this scene where she’s being disarmed is honestly like peak hotness for me and I don’t know why. I like my women sullen and covered in knives?

Interesting how allegedly only the warriors knew English and yet Lxa’s big announcement re: get in line with me or die is made in English. Just going to point out yet again what a big mistake that throwaway S1 line is.

What a sad life to lead, where random declarations followed by “or death” have to form the entirety of your belief system “Don’t be upset that your wife and child are dead...or I’ll beat you to a pulp.” I truly don’t understand how we were ever supposed to get in line with this society as sympathetic or interesting. So much so that they get a whole prequel I guess???

I’d rather have a Mount Weather prequel except not really, don’t ruin it for me.

I love Miller’s canonical insane superhuman strength. This is a trait often overlooked in fics.

The usual comment on Mount Weather scenes: I love all of it.

The thing is that if everyone were on board with the funeral ceremony, it is touching. Murderer and murdered together, and the people who’ve been hurt, on both sides, saying goodbye as a group. It’s just that Clarke’s people were coerced into this--they weren’t convinced it would be a fitting ceremony, just told ‘well this is how it is and if you don’t like it, we could perhaps... KILL YOU?”

Is this a new revelation that Mount Weather crashed the Exodus ship (still a really satisfying belated explanation imo)? Or did we know that because, unlike Monty et al, we knew about the jamming signals already? Can’t remember.

You can see how L came to believe what she believes but nevertheless this is bad advice lol. “Don’t care about other people.” Okay, I’ll just stop doing that then.

Mmmm, a feast in a subway station. Delicious. Fucking full pig head as the centerpiece. Very DC.

Kane (handing over pure space moonshine probably): Just don’t drink too much of it. Clarke (five minutes later): Guzzles whole bottle at once. #partygriff is officially canon.

Waiting until tomorrow to start the war? Procrastinators. Clarke didn’t kill Finn for this.

I love Certified Dramatic Ho Bellamy knocking the cup out of Clarke’s hand even though she had made no move whatsoever to drink it.

“When you plunged your knife into the heart of the boy you loved, did you not wish that it was mine.” Lxa, also a certified Dramatic Ho.

Clarke kinda deserved to be punched in the face given that it wouldn’t actually make sense for Raven to try to poison Lxa--and make Finn’s death mean nothing? And put them all in danger in enemy territory? Nonsense. Nevertheless it’s hard not to feel bad for her when she follows this accusation up with a psychotic break.

Hmmm, do I think Abby turning in Jake was the same as Clarke killing Finn? Not really. She didn’t directly kill Jake, that was Jaha, and Jaha is who Clarke should really be mad at. That said, I don’t think she was really saving anyone in the direct way Clarke was. So, apples and oranges. Crazy awkward moment to bring it up, though lol. “Oh Clarke, you’ll feel better eventually--remember that time I killed your Dad? I got over that! Wait--does talking about your dead father upset you? That’s a surprise!” Nevertheless I appreciate major actions having consequences as that’s a semi-rarity on this show.

Monty Green: hero.

“Lxa needs this alliance as much as we do.” - True, if she intends to get her people out of MW. “She’s shown herself to be flexible.” - Not true. She’s given the bare minimum of concessions. Kane, please crawl back out of her colon for like 5 seconds, get some air.

Interesting that Raven and Bellamy are chilling near each other. I wonder what they were discussing. Tbh Bellamy’s feelings on everything in this episode are rather opaque. Other than understanding why Clarke mercy-killed Finn and being skeptical of the alliance.

“Kill one person and destroy the alliance” is literally only merciful because the default in this society is “kill everyone all the time for any reason.” Like, I guess??? That’s mercy by comparison?? But forgive me if I am not moved to admiration.

“This time justice will be done” says the woman who used the barest sliver of evidence to decide that a random person was guilty so she could have a public execution. A public execution to replace the other public execution, in fact, not to avenge a death because Gustus isn’t dead. (Yet.)

Kane’s really okay with letting Raven be tortured to death, huh? Gah he’s fucking annoying.

Bellarke: Crime Solving Duo. That’s some satisfying teamwork. Clarke figures out how the scheme worked. Bellamy figures out who’s behind the scheme. With all the evidence put together, the motive becomes clear. (Honesty, they should have been suspicious that the poison not only didn’t kill Gustus, it barely harmed him lol.)

Check out all the Department of Homeland Security stuff on Monty’s computer. This is perhaps Dante’s log in? There’s a set of “personal” files too. And a set of President’s Office files, which one would assume not everyone would have.

Anyway, I have a Thing for tense sequences of hackers...hacking.

When I first watched this season I was often so tense my whole body hurt and it’s mostly because of MW scenes like this one where Monty is caught. Like aaaaah it still gets me. He almost makes it... and then almost makes it again, with his silly little salute... (Never forget that he is A Dork.)

On the one hand, Raven being tortured and then seeing Gustus tortured to death allows her to see why Clarke killing Finn was an act of mercy, to forgive her, and to move on, so the narrative can continue with them as allies and nominal friends. And it works, basically. But I also think there’s something to the theory that they were never the same, that the wound never really healed.

I’m sorry but Octavia’s face when Clarke’s like “Yeah B, you’re expendable, go get yourself killed, have a map!!” is hilarious. Like, he’s just said that Gustus doing anything for Lxa made sense, and Octavia responded with “Look at the thanks he got” which seems to me like She Knows and then 5 seconds later Bellamy is basically thrown away by the person we all know he’d do anything for... I mean the face is fair. Also this is Bellamy’s idea and it’s a good idea and so he was right before and Clarke is also right now, but it’s still so... annoying.... like “okay, I’m done caring about you lol bye.”

And Raven’s just totally confused. It’s been a damn long day I guess.

Why are they all such fucking hotties? It’s hard to pay attention to “the plot.”

So the ashes Abby tries to give to Clarke are the same ashes, perhaps, that Jasper scatters in S3? This vial looks smaller. Why did she not immediately give them to Raven? That would seem to be the obvious thing to do.

And here we see Clarke, under L’s direct influence, becoming Increasingly Insufferable. I love her but this is obviously supposed to be her descent into the abyss: she treats her friends like little expendable minions, she turns her back on Finn’s memory, and then she ends the episode by dramatically walking into a dark room in slow motion to creepy chamber music. I mean this is the hero’s fall guys!! That’s what it always was!!!

If only they’d handled Bellamy’s hero’s fall in 3A, and Clarke’s rise again in 3B, as well.

That ending is a straight up horror movie thanks that’s why this is my favorite season.

#the year 2020 #2020: fandom thoughts #2020: the 100 s2

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brajeshupadhyay · 4 years

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Narendra Modi's Rs 20 lakh crore stimulus blends shrewd geo-economics with Swadeshi-coated booster, but it may not be a panacea for jobs growth

Behind Modi's obvious push for India's self-reliance through an "Atma Nirbhar Bharat' call, there is not the conventional inward-looking approach that was the hallmark of Mahatma Gandhi's Swadeshi approach that advocated a "Be Indian, Buy Indian" philosophy; nor is there a Nehruvian wish to come out of colonial-era clutches by building a domestic industrial base.

While what we see outwardly is a cocktail of the two in terms of political messaging to build on national pride, the deeper subtext is of a post-globalisation, post-Coronavirus universe in which India is trying to reduce imports from China while becoming an alternative manufacturing base in a worldwide supply chain web. A key takeaway from Modi's speech is: "India does not advocate self-centred arrangements when it comes to self-reliance."

There are many questions still unanswered as the details of the prime minister's package are yet to be fleshed out. Finance Minister Nirmala Sitharaman's planned announcements will be keenly watched.

But it is clear that to truly get the import of Modi's strategy, we have to look beyond his loyal cheerleaders who see grand statesmanship in everything he does or says, and his bitter critics quickly find flaws or superficiality in what he says.

We have to look at both the content and the context of Modi's 33-minute speech to get some clarity. They are such that he is trying to package the inevitable as an initiative while spotting the opportunity in the virus threat that might potentially alter the world economic order. We could call it the rise of 'geo-economics' as a logical corollary of geopolitics in which Japan and the West may look for an alternative growth base to Corona-stung China. India is clearly the leading large-scale candidate to fill the gap.

But there is many a slip between the cup and the lip. Questions remain on key aspects of the stimulus, which include land and labour issues going beyond the simple arithmetic formula of spending to boost growth.

First, we need to know what is the short-term help needed on a large-scale to aid hundreds of millions of migrant and informal sector workers coping with a lack of jobs/incomes on the one hand and a public health emergency on the other. As this is being written, crowded railway stations and migrants walking the highways pose a clear and present danger of a community spread of the COVID-19 pandemic.

Secondly, we need to see how much of the stimulus package constitutes real spending involving taxpayer money. It is clear that what India lacks now in demand and a tax squeeze at this juncture looks neither desirable nor feasible. If global credit rating agencies see a financial crisis arising from overspending, it may put foreign direct investment (FDI) on difficult ground. However, industrial output shrank 16.7 percent year-on-year in March, when the lockdown was initiated. Modi has rightly erred on the side of industrial revival rather than inflation management because retail inflation at four-month lows provides the right ballast for spending more. Lower global oil prices also provide elbow room for spending.

It is not clear if the Reserve Bank of India's moves to aid liquidity forms part of the planned stimulus. We may reasonably assume that credit guarantees to help small businesses may handsomely add to the stimulus number that looks like 10 percent of the GDP but in effect will be less of a fiscal threat to the government. The speech is aimed at talking up an economy frozen on its tracks, which is a smart thing to do because things have come to a point where the threat from hunger, joblessness and social chaos seem to loom larger than that invisible virus from Wuhan.

That still leaves us with the big question: where is the extra dose of money going to come from? A smart guess would be: overseas. While global investors with their view from a London or New York may look at India as a long-term alternative to China, the Modi government's own close relations with Japan may provide leverage. Japan has announced a $1.1 trillion stimulus to face the COVID-19 challenge, estimated at 21 percent of Japan's GDP. Part of that money can find its way into India because India has both a manufacturing base and a demography plus demand equation that provides a market for a developed country in search of a market. Modi clearly spoke of the demography and demand factors in his speech. Remember, India's Foreign Minister Subrahmanyam Jaishankar is an old Japan hand.

We also have to look at the slew labour law liberalisation measures in BJP-ruled states over the past few days, especially in Uttar Pradesh, as an incentive for Japanese investors because infrastructure and labour issues have been critical for the Samurai corporations.

Investment, however, is only part of the future story. Migrant workers going back to their villages, and their nursing psychological wounds caused by an unimagined virus threat, will be factored in bringing them back to their shop floors -- or not. If controversial labour laws hinder rather than help their mood, things could be difficult. Last but not least, even if overseas manufacturers increase their base in India, they will take a while to set up shop -- and when they do, given the growth of robotics and automation across industries, we do not know how much of that will translate into jobs for teeming millions.

However, if the stimulus is used to clean up India's banking system by measures such as a widely speculated "bad bank" to absorb the hangover of the non-performing assets (NPAs) problem, public sector banks may revive or ease up lending to micro, small and medium enterprises (MSMEs). That might help more than FDI shots in creating jobs.

We need to also see the timeline over which the government will spend its money and the way industries respond. The COVID-19 threat is a health scare. Some of the behavioural changes it has ushered in and/or will usher in are unknown factors in a complex economic chessboard. One is tempted to draw a parallel with Modi's 2016 gambit on demonetisation of high-value currency notes that did not quite work. With an estimated 27 to 30 million youths having lost their jobs in lockdown-whacked April (that is more than the population of all of Australia), the big threat to any fiscal booster is not inflation but unemployment -- for which there is no panacea.

Modi's speech is thus a long-term strategic push and a short-term mood builder. Between the mood and the promise falls the long shadow of real-life economics.

Just as hydroxychloroquine is more of a tentative treatment for the COVID-19 virus than a certain cure, Modi's booster may well be more of a necessary, but not a sufficient gambit to lift India's sagging economy.

The writer is a senior journalist and commentator. He tweets as @madversity

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ironjohnred · 4 years

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Cycles

h/t @SKRedPill

One, you must be hungry to relish food. You can't do it while full. All human instincts run in cycles, regardless of what you believe about love and life. In love, separation creates the pull that brings union, and union soon creates a push towards separation for the next cycle. You forget about the cyclic nature of love somewhere and end up killing it. If you don't realize this, the next cycle of love might very well not involve you!

Two, you are a deeper problem -- forever needy, your instincts running without any sanity, and your unhappiness a deep rooted chronic suffering that'll never go away till you face the "unhappy me" that's never here and now. What "unhappy me" was really seeking, you can't pursue that one thing, because it's not there, but here. This is not the usual happiness that comes and goes in waves, this joy is freedom from slavery to happiness. You can't chase it, but only bring it into your life and express it. Only that can cure deep suffering

This started out as a comment as to a poster talking about why women don't ever seem happy even after they have the perfect life they've dreamt of and chased all their lives. They eventually initiate a cycle of withdrawal, using every trick in the book (all these are well known moves now), that left to itself will end the relationship. Sooner or later they just chase the next hot guy and often in the process wreck their own lives and the lives of others around them. Why doesn't happily ever after exist? How many times do we see that so and so is "Never happy?"

In the past, someone predicted that after machines take over all the jobs, we'll finally have time to relax and enjoy life and its pleasures. Well, think about being jobless for just one week, soon you'll be dealing with mass depression and suicide and unemployment and horror households. I am sure most women would totally lose all their attraction for their ambiton-less lazy men. Why do we dread the utopia?

Because everything in the physical universe runs in cycles.

There is a saying that wanting is better than having. Or that only a starving man knows the real taste of food. Or the sweetest water in the world is water in a desert. The best sleep comes after a hard day's work.

Your body can play tricks with your sense of perception, it will make you do fantastic things when its survival is under threat. If you're very hungry or thirsty, you'd swear that food and water themselves taste different, and like nothing they do on normal days. There was this guy (I think Joe Decker) who ran in the Badwater Marathon and got severely dehydrated due to salt. His team saved the day with a box of salt, and what when he got hold of it, he literally ate the salt right off the box. True story. I've seen very hot summers, and you just want to keep eating salty food.

And then once you have eaten too much, your body actually changes its sense of taste so you don't want to eat anymore. The same thing you devoured easily and effortlessly as a hungry guy might now actually feel terrible to keep eating. You might even get upset or irritated when someone forces you to eat more when you're full and just want to leave the table. Don't you see this with kids and even some grown ups all the time?

When loaded with adrenaline, you can exert yourself like pain doesn't exist. The next day though...

In old books on love, it is said that love burns stronger in separation than union. That's why you have all these stories of separated lovers pining for each other. Separation is a driving force, creating the pull between subject and object. Union quenches the thirst of separation, but eventually by corollary, union will create the push that again drives you to another round of separation, which then brings you back to enjoy the next union, and so on.

There could also be other things wrong - for one the women are always seeking the next adventure, the next high, the next moment and aren't satisfied being in this moment. As a result they are ever needy. Highs become an expectation, and the moment they do, one becomes unhappy.

No amount of anything in this moment that they can have now will satisfy them when they're always looking for the next moment and the next thrill.

The idea that you can have it all and then be satisfied forever is a myth we all tell ourselves to motivate our chase for the next big thing out there. In reality we are really just seeking drama of the chase and the finish line the whole time. The biggest myth you can tell yourself is that if the chase ends, you'll be happy ever after. Once separation ends, and the pain of seeking is gone, you'll be happy and stay together forever.

No way.

That feeling will last for a short time, then it will be time to get back to normal, recharge and start the next adventure. Any high of any kind will soon have to come down for a low or the baseline, any wave will have to pass on for the next wave to come in. Without the cycle of union and separation, love dies.

And that's also why in times of lockdown and home bound, not taking into account the impact on jobs, the financial stress and the economic crash, all the people who claimed they always wanted to spend more time at home sweet home with their families are getting restless and finding the other intolerable. I know, it's happening in my own extended family. In some cases, they even get abusive to each other in a matter of days. Domestic violence has indeed increased quite a bit in many places around the world during the lockdown. Just look at people who've finally retired from whatever they were doing, for a long time they can just be intolerable and forever upset and unhappy at home, like an addict with withdrawal symptoms, and they won't even know why or what to do about it.

So there are 2 solutions. One, after people have had their fill, create hunger again. Most of your base firmware instincts work only when there's a real need, not whenever you want it, and definitely they don't work the way you believe they should. Love isn't anything what people believe it should be logically - it is base firmware. This always works only in cycles, just like everything else in nature. That's why dread and separation matter and why push and pull or sex-comfort-sex works. You have to respect these facts about your instincts. Even breathing works only push and pull. Try and see what happens if you hold your breath with your lungs full or your lungs empty. You won't last very long at either end. You cannot be active 24 hours a day, nor can you sleep as long as you want. Sooner or later your body will demand sleep or force you to get your ass out of bed. Sex too is cyclic. Even muscle building totally needs you to nail the cycle of exercise vs recovery, or else it doesn't work.

Life leads to death, and death is ground for new life. If cycles are true for everything in existence, why do you think a base instinct like love is an exception to the rule?

Although you might think that union is forever, sooner or later, union is bound to create a pushing force again. As bad or as angry as it makes us feel, this is actually natural. No really, your anger only comes out of failing to realize that all emotional highs and lows are temporary and that love is not what you believed it would be. There will be a push that creates separation and dread again, and this is essential for the next round of attraction and union.

There is a reason why it is said, "Familiarity breeds contempt". Old proverbs, lots of experience talking.

So your best bet is to create these cycles yourself. Don't overfill the tank or don't let it drain all the way to empty. Treat love like a Lithium ion battery. Organize the cyclic nature of your own instincts, or else they'll do it in a very reckless indiscriminate way and you'll screw up the life you've created.

Most men allow themselves to go beta simply because they don't realize the cyclic nature of human needs and instincts. They think it's over once you're in a committed relationship. What they don't know is that it's over for just a brief while. Then love needs to start off a fresh cycle, or else sooner or later it will happen subconsciously. Women don't believe it either, but our bodies know better.

So the guy stops doing everything that made him attractive as a lover, he destroys the very cycle of push and pull, union and separation. There're no cycles of love in being a provider, just a routine and chores. He tries to empathize with her pain by trying to make her happy (rather than she empathizing with his abundance), not realizing that she can't shine by her own light, but by his, and that's what is lacking. He tries to do more of the filling her up with niceness and she gets sick of over-eating on what he thinks is love. Eventually she pushes herself away for good, to feel hungry for love again and jump into another cycle of push-pull that someone else gives.

Also, discipline is not natural to base instincts. In the past life was super hard enough on its own to enforce its own discipline, but we are just not used to easy good times where we have to consciously keep up the discipline. So in good times, people's minds and bodies just go awry. Just look at the obesity epidemic these days! Left to itself, love, just like any base pleasure instinct, will try to keep its cycle going in very disorganized and wild ways that can be destructive in modern times if left undisciplined.

That is one essential skill we learn here in RP and MRP, is creating a healthy cycle of separation and dread followed by sex and comfort. There are many of us who know first hand that if we don't maintain healthy cycle ourselves, it will try to go by its own devices nevertheless, and we might very well not be a part of the next cycle!!

EDIT : Every time your relationship changes from one stage to another on the hierarchy ladder, the old cycle of push-pull attraction changes or is broken. Marriage is the worst offender here, but it can apply to all levels. Before an LTR or marriage dating came with a natural push and pull cycle, but afterward you end up spending most of your time sharing space and time which can kill the old cycle. Without starting off a new intimacy cycle and getting into a new rhythm, attraction can very quickly plummet in the next stage of a relationship. A similar thing can happen in long running marriages after retirement. The work-home division itself created a cycle of its own that most people don't pay attention to and when it goes, it can come with a lot of issues.

That solution addresses the immediate problem - not allowing the cycle of love to flow naturally. Not creating enough dread and separation to bring the hunger and attraction back for the next round.

Two, and this is the bigger, deeper problem here - is that regardless of which situation you find yourself in, you're unhappy one way or the other. You chase love because you're unhappy and then you push it away because you're not happy having got everything you wanted. You're not at ease in any situation really. This problem is purely internal and you are doing this to yourself. It is this that has been referred to by some wise guys as the root of suffering. This is an illness. If it was a situational issue, changing the situation should have solved it. When you've made all the changes and you / she is still not happy, it's high time to recognize you have a deeper problem -- with yourself.

Satiation is like the mid point between need and abundance. Problem and Solution #1 can help you stay managing the cycle of need <-> satisfying said need. But Problem #2 is about the deeper issue of not knowing abundance of life, and always living in a needy dependent state.

Real needs run in cycles or they're a one time thing. When needs are met, they become satisfied. One time needs don't come back. Suffering however, is a bottomless pit of neediness, no matter how much you try to fill it, it just gets worse. It's like the social media news feed.

You try to solve this suffering through any number of means. You think if you just find that one ideal thing missing in your life, it could be love or money or power or that perfect car or job or woman -- that will be happily ever after, and you are very disappointed and angry when you find that the thing you sought wasn't anything like what you believed it was, and even more disappointed when it did not solve the root of your misery.

Ever observed that over time Valentine's Day has become "Expectations Day to be loved" rather than a "Day for love"? That's what happens when highs become an expectation rather than a gift. I joke with my cousins' husbands that they're just dreading Valentine's Day, and they laugh. What went wrong?

The solution needs a bit of spirituality -- stop resisting this moment. Need is always looking to the future for fulfillment. Your dysfunctional patterns with a proven history of failure are stuck in the memory of the past. Abundance however is only in this moment. Your mind is never here, it's always looking for the grass on the other side. That will help you achieve your goals and chase your dreams, but it will lock into a pattern of perpetual seeking if it becomes an addiction and you forget that life is only ever happening here and now. You will never find fulfillment you seek in the end, because abundance doesn't come from outside, it's actually generated from within.

Your addiction to pleasure is not a journey to happiness - it is a journey of misery trying to numb itself, unable to face the truth of itself or life. That's why those who fill their lives up with every pleasure the world can offer turn out to be the most broken and depressed, messed up individuals you can find. Binge on YT and netflix for hours together, and you wonder why you feel so depressed at the end of the day. If you look too far into the future for your salvation, you'll only see death, not life, because life is now. All those people around you who're pursuing the dream of happiness? Nah, they're really just running away from their own suffering.

The secret of lasting happiness is this - you will never find as long as you seek. Unhappy people seek happiness, and the more you try to seek it, the more you convince yourself that you are unhappy, and the unhappier you become. Lasting happiness doesn't exist until you are free from this incessant need to be happy, caused by the root of your own suffering. Pleasure and pain are two sides of the same coin. Of late your quest for happiness has become so bad, you can't even focus on a task for a few minutes because your brain's too addicted to dopamine. You must become free from the grip of happiness itself to find abundance and fulfillment.

Actually it can't even be called happiness, it is abundance beyond happiness, or freedom. Freedom from the whole pleasure-pain trap. Happiness is just a wave on the surface of the water comparison, it throws you up to a high, and then you crash back down to a low / baseline. That forever comes and goes, no point in getting upset over it and trying to hang on to a high - that is futile - don't resist its flow. Lasting abundance comes from the depth of the ocean, which is ever there regardless of what waves are doing on the surface. When you're ok with this fact, you start experiencing freedom to create the life you've wanted, because now you're no longer afraid of discomfort or growth, or the waves of life, or facing the truth. That's freedom.

That inner freedom / abundance is what deep down you really want, and it is that which frees you of your chronic inner neediness and suffering. Every other thing in this universe you can chase and pursue, but this one thing you can't pursue, because it's already here and now. The more you chase it, the more you'll lose it, and the more your life gets fucked up.

It took me 12 damned years of breaking my head over the happiness problem - whether I'll find happiness or not, or whether this will make me happy or not in the future, to why people were still unhappy despite having it all, to why I was becoming increasingly unhappier and depressed, to finally realize my mistake. A simple, but dreadful mistake -- my frame was a fucked up one. My idea of happiness was fundamentally fucked up.

You cannot really pursue true happiness or abundance. You can only express it and bring it into your life. The more you pursue it, the less you will find. Every other thing - goals, achievements, things, people - can be pursued in this universe, but this can't. Abundance can only be brought in. That's the secret.

If you ever in your life want to know the nature of abundant love, you'll have to stop trying to escape this moment. So long as the root of suffering exists, you'll keep sabotaging your life by any number of means. Your "unhappy me" wants to live just like everything else, and it will keep doing anything to fuck up its life so it can feel the pleasure of unfucking itself up. It's a disorder - where you want to make yourself sick because you are wondering if the medicine still works and because the process of getting well is more important than actually staying naturally healthy.

What that unhappy me doesn't realize (or doesn't want to face) is that it itself is the root cause of the problem that doesn't let it stay happy for long in any situation. Pretty much everything you do in this state is driven only by suffering. There's no abundance in the suffering condition. What you normally call as love is just the sweetest most acceptable form of psychopathy. Almost everything you do, every distracted moment, every unhappy thought, every dissatisfied emotion, every attempt at trying to escape the misery in this moment with drugs or alcohol or games or sex or suicide, all originates from a chronic malaise to escape the moment of experience (this moment) and then try to recapture your lost abundance chasing it elsewhere, but not where it really is - here.

This behavior is not unlike a black hole - no matter how much you throw at it, it doesn't seem to go away, but only get bigger. And it's not going to go away till you realize what you're really doing. You have to have the balls to face this, that it is indeed your fault and responsibility to face this and deal with this. If every thing is always a problem, then perhaps you are the problem.

Why does your unhappy self resist this moment so much? Because it knows the solution to suffering will finish the ego. So it will do anything to keep up the drama of being unhappy and then seeking the next solution, the next high, the next lover, the next big thing. Deep down, unhappy me, subconsciously knows that it is the problem, and when it becomes too unhappy it tries to take itself out by trying to kill itself in many ways on the outside - suicide, addictions, depression, violence, abusive relationships, you name it. But those are not solutions. The real solution is mindful awareness of unhappy me itself, knowing that it is there and observing it in this moment, catching it as it arises -- that will take the air out of it, deflate and dissolve it.

Well, so if women are never happy no matter what, maybe they should look inside for the answer... in the meantime, you better too. After all, regardless of whose fault it is, it's going to fall on your head, and only you are responsible for your life and salvation.

Ok, if you don't like the word spirituality, at least learn the word discipline. If love could be seen as food, virtually every other person you meet is either starving like a famine victim or has some kind of eating disorder, and has absolutely no consistency or discipline maintaining even their mealtimes, let alone their calorific balance. Healthy eating with a bit of discipline isn't as hard as it seems, in a matter of time your mind and body will get used to it as the benefits begin to show. The brain is very flexible and can indeed be trained consciously. You gotta to be fine both bulking and cutting if you want to stay lean and build muscle. And now you need a similar approach with love -- it's high time to go on a healthy love diet. At least do this much.

So putting both together, You'll have to train yourself to be ok both in the chase and the peace afterward. Regardless of weather you're chasing your dreams or just being content, if you can be at ease with yourself, then whatever happens, you can use it to your advantage rather than suffering every single thing that happens to you and making others suffer around you as well. You'll have to know when to play and when to stop and be happy in both. Most are usually one or the other. This is far more challenging than it looks - most people's biggest problem is that they will seldom acknowledge that much of their suffering today is what they're doing this to themselves. Very few people solve this, reconciling two seemingly opposing forces and getting them to dance together. You've got to fulfill your needy side but also allow your abundant side to flow in to your life.

You've gotta learn to be at ease in both - if you succeed, you're free. You can do whatever you want. The root of suffering is finished. Now what happens is driven not because you're always unhappy, but by awareness and abundance seeking to express its potential. You've become closer to a white hole now. Your needs are actually needs now - they're not a bottomless pit that can never be filled - there's a difference between the two. Your energy is abundant and infectious in a good way and inspires others too. The real reason for your suffering is that the abundant and capable life that is you has never found expression. You have been trying to fill a needy you up with pleasures to numb the pain, and it just made it worse, because at the end of the day, your life was suppressed and just became even unhappier.

An aware life will actually bring you a lot more abundance and life than the needy guy who operates from a point of origin of pain and suffering. That's the ultimate challenge you'll ever face in your life. Very few people ever reached this kind of mastery where they live this way.

You cannot remain "high" forever. And you shouldn't. In fact once you realize life goes in waves and cycles, it's actually best to run them optimally as they were meant to be. But you can always be present, and once you look closely at it, you'll see you're always present, it's only the mind that always wants an escape. Then the highs become gifts you are grateful for, not expectations that ultimately disappoint you, and the lows become moments to bring in abundance. Life goes from running entirely on reactive mode to a more proactive and responsible mode. You go from being victim to channeling your inner creator. That is freedom, freedom from the very need to escape to freedom.

The utopia of your bluepilled dreams does not exist. And that's actually a good thing to know. It sets you free.

So here's a powerful exercise for your mind and self. Identify a few things that give you that rush of happiness and dopamine, that always keep distracting you or making you addicted and deliberately avoid them for sometime. Don't resist the reality of being free of them. Just spend sometime away and witness all the garbage inside your mind rise to the surface. If this happens, sit down and be fully present and aware of the one who's mind is bothering them, you, the living life in you. Your mind will trouble you for a while, but then it will begin to settle down. It might feel like dying for a while, the burden of time that you were trying to kill might start to hurt you hard, but stay present - in times of suffering, your mind narrows down and naturally comes back to this moment as this is the only place where there's really no stress. But that's the whole point -- you have to come to ease with yourself. Then you may go back to doing those things -- but always remember to withdraw and withdraw completely - don't just do it half way, go all the way. Push and pull.

You might initially feel strangely empty not filling up that void inside yourself, or having a lot of time that you can't kill somehow, but don't do it. Soon you'll realize it isn't emptiness but freedom, like a load of compulsion lifted off your mind. That freedom contains way more possibilities for you to create your life as you should have. Once you start coming to ease being present, the dreaded burden of time will start coming down a lot - this is a sign that suffering or the unhappy me is losing its grip at last. The need to kill time by any means begins to vanish when you find the one timeless thing there is. Time is no longer stressful or restless - it is now an opportunity.

Sometime after knowing this, you may find a new original idea, a fresh inspiration, or you might just go back to your usual life, but that peace of being unburdened will now come into whatever you're doing.

This will strengthen your inner muscle of mindfulness to be present with whatever situation that presents itself, and stop resisting what is needed for your growth. You have to be at ease with the fact that everything is a wave and everything comes in cycles and everything comes and goes. When you're fully present here, you don't hang on or resist the facts of life. Remove the friction and life feels lubricated. In time you will find you can be inspired to do things you never imagined you could do. You will stop being "never happy", by being free of this incessant quest for happiness itself. Then you can just surf the waves of life. If a high comes, enjoy it. It it goes, you come back to normal, be grateful and be at peace. Nothing is forever, but you now accept it for what it is and realize it's indeed for the best. Inner peace and living presence will always be there no matter what you're surfing - that alone is ever.

The next step is important. Once you feel this, stay in it for a while, and then when you have to get going, actively bring some of that mindful presence / peace / abundance / awareness (whatever you call it) into your every activity. Bring this awareness in whenever unhappy me raises its head, when the voice in your head talks too loudly, when you're feeling both high and low. Your pain will soon start losing its grip. Soon even simple things will become surprisingly fulfilling once this incessant need to find happiness comes down. Bring it in, intensely.

It even changes the way you want and desire. The "If only I have that one thing, I'll be happily ever after" - the victim's script goes down. Now you will find yourselves desiring to do something or get something directly (a simple "I want this"), or you may find yourselves driven to address something needed, and above all, now you're willing to embrace pain and discomfort if need be. You own the consequences of your desires. You desire more like a great achiever and less like a needy guy.

What we've done in society is we've given ourselves too much freedom without the consciousness to handle so much freedom safely. Our biology simply can't keep up with our pace of evolution. We've made ourselves too comfy, too technologically advanced, eliminated outside suffering, kept nature far away (or so we think, Coronavirus has made us think again), but our instincts work like they're still in the wild, and unhappy me is big as ever. We've given children loaded guns. The way we are right now, we are way too needy still, and therefore we're compulsively and indiscriminately creating push pull cycles subconsciously without any thought for the consequences. Until we evolve consciously, and learn how to handle ourselves in the good times sensibly, we'll always be unhappy and make our lives a mess no matter what happens. It's time to bring in a better consciousness.

So to sum it up - life and love works in cycles. In love matters, separation creates the attractive pull that leads to union, but sooner or later union is going to create a new push, leading to another round of separation and the start of another cycle. If you are not alert, that next cycle might not even happen with you. Part of why that happens is due to the cyclic nature of our physical instincts and needs, but beyond that, the deeper reasons for perpetually "not happy" is due to a perpetual unease and unhappiness with this moment, that just guarantees you'll suffer in any scenario. The first one can be solved with a proper dose of dread and separation, the second one is a disease that runs deep and is never going to be solved from the outside. If you are not really happy in any situation, the problem is you alone. That will only go away when your unhappy me that forever struggles against this moment is gone.

What you call "abundance" I would call "acceptance". It seems like a more accurate label, since "acceptance" allows you to be at peace both in moments of striving-for-more and dissatisfaction-from-having-it-all, while still being able to participate in the game and not completely giving up - after all, even the most ardent monks cannot escape biology. And completely giving up because you've found "abundance" is giving into yet another utopia fantasy.

Yes acceptance is sort of like the first most important step. But the trick to that is honest acceptance, which means reconciling to the truth of life. Abundance comes a little further down the road once you've realized you already have the "deep" fulfilling happiness you seek and the happiness of pleasure comes and goes like waves. Once the expectation that you should be high all the time goes away after some struggle , you feel relieved even, and that's when you realize you were in fact driven by pain the whole time.

Once you are free of this even a couple of steps, you can give some room to bring in what you're really capable of adding. That is the point of abundance. Of course so long as you live you'll have needs, but you won't be in a bottomless pit of neediness now.

Every time your relationship changes from one stage to another on the hierarchy ladder, the old cycle of push-pull attraction changes or is broken. Marriage is the worst offender here, but it can apply to all levels. Before an LTR or marriage dating came with a natural push and pull cycle, but afterward you end up spending most of your time sharing space and time which can kill the old cycle. Without starting off a new intimacy cycle and getting into a new rhythm, attraction can very quickly plummet in the next stage of a relationship. A similar thing can happen in long running marriages after retirement. The work-home division itself created a cycle of its own that most people don't pay attention to and when it goes, it can come with a lot of issues.

When OP was talking about happiness being a wave I was immediately taken back to a quote my grandfather shared with me. I asked him what the meaning of life was. After a few months he sent me a voicemail. "Prepare for the flow of life and flow along with it." He's 91. I wish it would have clicked then but it definitely clicked now. Unhappy me has been the driver all along, I just wasn't expressing this idea correctly when I thought about it. I kept thinking it was somebody or someone else controlling me but it's always been me. Just the unhappy one.

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brajeshupadhyay · 4 years

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'Looking at London, talking to Tokyo,' is an expression used sometimes to describe a squint in the eye or a cross-eyed view. But this could almost literally be an appropriate metaphor for Prime Minister Narendra Modi's Rs 20-lakh-crore stimulus announced to revive India's economy hit by the COVID-19 pandemic. Behind Modi's obvious push for India's self-reliance through an "Atma Nirbhar Bharat' call, there is not the conventional inward-looking approach that was the hallmark of Mahatma Gandhi's Swadeshi approach that advocated a "Be Indian, Buy Indian" philosophy; nor is there a Nehruvian wish to come out of colonial-era clutches by building a domestic industrial base. While what we see outwardly is a cocktail of the two in terms of political messaging to build on national pride, the deeper subtext is of a post-globalisation, post-Coronavirus universe in which India is trying to reduce imports from China while becoming an alternative manufacturing base in a worldwide supply chain web. A key takeaway from Modi's speech is: "India does not advocate self-centred arrangements when it comes to self-reliance." There are many questions still unanswered as the details of the prime minister's package are yet to be fleshed out. Finance Minister Nirmala Sitharaman's planned announcements will be keenly watched. But it is clear that to truly get the import of Modi's strategy, we have to look beyond his loyal cheerleaders who see grand statesmanship in everything he does or says, and his bitter critics quickly find flaws or superficiality in what he says. We have to look at both the content and the context of Modi's 33-minute speech to get some clarity. They are such that he is trying to package the inevitable as an initiative while spotting the opportunity in the virus threat that might potentially alter the world economic order. We could call it the rise of 'geo-economics' as a logical corollary of geopolitics in which Japan and the West may look for an alternative growth base to Corona-stung China. India is clearly the leading large-scale candidate to fill the gap. But there is many a slip between the cup and the lip. Questions remain on key aspects of the stimulus, which include land and labour issues going beyond the simple arithmetic formula of spending to boost growth. First, we need to know what is the short-term help needed on a large-scale to aid hundreds of millions of migrant and informal sector workers coping with a lack of jobs/incomes on the one hand and a public health emergency on the other. As this is being written, crowded railway stations and migrants walking the highways pose a clear and present danger of a community spread of the COVID-19 pandemic. Secondly, we need to see how much of the stimulus package constitutes real spending involving taxpayer money. It is clear that what India lacks now in demand and a tax squeeze at this juncture looks neither desirable nor feasible. If global credit rating agencies see a financial crisis arising from overspending, it may put foreign direct investment (FDI) on difficult ground. However, industrial output shrank 16.7 percent year-on-year in March, when the lockdown was initiated. Modi has rightly erred on the side of industrial revival rather than inflation management because retail inflation at four-month lows provides the right ballast for spending more. Lower global oil prices also provide elbow room for spending. It is not clear if the Reserve Bank of India's moves to aid liquidity forms part of the planned stimulus. We may reasonably assume that credit guarantees to help small businesses may handsomely add to the stimulus number that looks like 10 percent of the GDP but in effect will be less of a fiscal threat to the government. The speech is aimed at talking up an economy frozen on its tracks, which is a smart thing to do because things have come to a point where the threat from hunger, joblessness and social chaos seem to loom larger than that invisible virus from Wuhan. That still leaves us with the big question: where is the extra dose of money going to come from? A smart guess would be: overseas. While global investors with their view from a London or New York may look at India as a long-term alternative to China, the Modi government's own close relations with Japan may provide leverage. Japan has announced a $1.1 trillion stimulus to face the COVID-19 challenge, estimated at 21 percent of Japan's GDP. Part of that money can find its way into India because India has both a manufacturing base and a demography plus demand equation that provides a market for a developed country in search of a market. Modi clearly spoke of the demography and demand factors in his speech. Remember, India's Foreign Minister Subrahmanyam Jaishankar is an old Japan hand. We also have to look at the slew labour law liberalisation measures in BJP-ruled states over the past few days, especially in Uttar Pradesh, as an incentive for Japanese investors because infrastructure and labour issues have been critical for the Samurai corporations. Investment, however, is only part of the future story. Migrant workers going back to their villages, and their nursing psychological wounds caused by an unimagined virus threat, will be factored in bringing them back to their shop floors -- or not. If controversial labour laws hinder rather than help their mood, things could be difficult. Last but not least, even if overseas manufacturers increase their base in India, they will take a while to set up shop -- and when they do, given the growth of robotics and automation across industries, we do not know how much of that will translate into jobs for teeming millions. However, if the stimulus is used to clean up India's banking system by measures such as a widely speculated "bad bank" to absorb the hangover of the non-performing assets (NPAs) problem, public sector banks may revive or ease up lending to micro, small and medium enterprises (MSMEs). That might help more than FDI shots in creating jobs. We need to also see the timeline over which the government will spend its money and the way industries respond. The COVID-19 threat is a health scare. Some of the behavioural changes it has ushered in and/or will usher in are unknown factors in a complex economic chessboard. One is tempted to draw a parallel with Modi's 2016 gambit on demonetisation of high-value currency notes that did not quite work. With an estimated 27 to 30 million youths having lost their jobs in lockdown-whacked April (that is more than the population of all of Australia), the big threat to any fiscal booster is not inflation but unemployment -- for which there is no panacea. Modi's speech is thus a long-term strategic push and a short-term mood builder. Between the mood and the promise falls the long shadow of real-life economics. Just as hydroxychloroquine is more of a tentative treatment for the COVID-19 virus than a certain cure, Modi's booster may well be more of a necessary, but not a sufficient gambit to lift India's sagging economy. The writer is a senior journalist and commentator. He tweets as @madversity

http://sansaartimes.blogspot.com/2020/05/narendra-modis-rs-20-lakh-crore.html

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