Of Packaged Food and People

Another supermarket opens in town offering you “The Best Shopping Experience Ever.”
How is it the best? Well, it has that many more rows of perfectly colour-coded vacuum-sealed items, each waiting to be picked following a guns-fully-blazing advertising campaign.

Everyone’s thronging The Mall. This one has more floors, more elevators, more glitz. So what if the shops are same as everywhere else. So what if two stores away the pink T I just picked is half as cheap because it comes with a different label. So what if everybody would know exactly where the aforementioned T was purchased. After all, wasn’t that the idea?

One would think that the new brand of retail culture would leave us spoilt for choice, with each item on the shelf promising to reach out to each one of us and satisfying individual needs and tastes. Does it?

It doesn’t matter. We don’t care about being individuals anymore. Besides, where is the space for individualism in a world of six billion and counting fast?

It starts early. Right from being wrapped in pink blankets or blue; from sharing a birthday with an estimated 225000 others in the world; from having a name for which Google comes up with 81000 pages. School teaches what hundreds before have not learnt and labels a student with marks that come with an expiry date of a few months. College trains one to become what scores before haven't become. The “hottest jobs” today are the ones where half-baked “professionals” hardly out of college are given a name-tag and an incomprehensible accent both of which they are loath to get rid of for even a minute, and take pride in the incompetence that makes them work ridiculous hours. The latest craze among the future of tomorrow is a social network that has each of its many thousands of users labelling their sense of humour as dry/sarcastic/friendly/clever/quick witted. (That should be fun.) Everyone is expected to sell themselves knowing that others will either find fault with the product or never expect it to be anything great anyway.

But we aren’t here to feel sorry for ourselves at any loss of individualism. McDonalds and free coke affected brains and systems have adapted incredibly well to the new way of living. Indifference to self is now a part of our genetic make-up. We have learnt to take pride (if and when we feel anything at all) about being a statistic in somebody’s research. It is my top priority to be a walking advertising board. I’m waiting to be persuaded into jumping onto the next bandwagon with the rest of the world.

Nobody is deluded enough to think they are “different.” And God forbid if they were different.
Who wants to stand out when they can fit in? Just another brick in the wall….

Karunya