Hack & Slash

Hack & Slash

The year was 2016. There wasn’t a pandemic around. People thought they had a semblance of what regular life was. I remember that time particularly well for reasons I might not well want to visit, but here I am. That was a point of transition in my life: from junior to senior academy. In junior academy I was made to learn- I mean gobble- everything on planet earth. But here I was tasked with the great decision of selecting something to determine my career. I felt like a superhero… Captain Underpants. Nevermind. My interest lay in the delicate yet ancient art of sword fighting. We were taught a great deal of that in the junior academy but the problem was somewhere else. While most people focused on the makings of the sword, I had my eyes on understanding the know hows of actual fighting techniques. People told me it had no scope. Being rather amused, I told them I was not interested in becoming a sniper either. It was a very binary case of ‘either-or’ where one could not really focus on both aspects. I have heard people trying to merge the two but it has led to them being sidelined by both the factions to be honest. I wanted to learn the art because I enjoyed it and I thought it would be fun doing something I love. That, my friends, was the first mistake.

A flower poisoned
welcome to my parlor

There were only a few proper coveted Elite city places which specialised in such training. Now the question was, how does someone get in? How do you prove your… ‘metal’? Hehe. Some places banked heavily on how I performed in my junior academy. The criteria were mind-boggling and it seemed to me then that only some aliens got into these places. I hear 79 people are eligible this time. I wanted to be there, amongst the chatty elites who wear their identity cards even when they go to buy milk from a local shop. I wanted to be that. I couldn’t. I had to put all my cards on something called the entrance tests. These were supposed to uphold the bastion of error free judgement. Getting through these, it seemed, was like being purified in the blood of the lamb as we used to chant in the junior days. Thanks to my brilliant score in the last exams, I could not qualify for that as well. But when I did sit, the experience was rather curious. Some wanted you to dance in front of them without the swords while justifying via huge columns how there was simply no better way of judgement. No biases there. Certainly not! I did get into one place but I had to leave as it resembled a spiritual army more. It was only later that I came to know that it was indeed the norm. Only that most don’t have uniforms. In Spite of that, I managed to land a place which was the best option for me at the time. I simply could not let it go! The actual game began thus.

Coins
Get Busy

Photo by RODNAE Productions on Pexels.com

On entering the academy, very early on, I realised that I needed to possess something called the ‘coin’. What were these coins you ask? These were needed to buy excellence. Let me explain. During the ancient days, someone displayed amazing moves with the sword and floored everyone with their skills. Since then people have been trying to emulate them disguised as trainers. The funny thing is, they try to emulate the same without having held the swords in the first place. Funny. What begins thus is like an absent presence of the elusive notion of originality. Everyone says you have to be original and show your moves but what actually is needed is the shadow coins available in the secretive locations of middle earth where you do not look at the performance or hold the swords for yourself, but look at the shadows of the same on the walls and try to dance in the same manner. What comes out resembles less of swordplay and more of the moves you make after having one shot too many of that good ol’ alcohol. A glorious mimetic metaphor! Some curious creatures went a step forward and imported these coins from the International markets which were apparently written by swords-people themselves! Hah what fools!

Reproductive System
In & out

What actually mattered was for how long you could dance like an incel in the exam hall and not what moves you actually displayed. Because it is always easier to run a timer than to actually look into the moves. Are you crazy? Who will do that much work? So this system went on and on and on until the people themselves were converted into hollow spectres of something else entirely. No one knew what people expected. The people did not know what to expect. A Derridean dream! People used us as case studies to teach Marx’s notion of Alienation in the classroom. How cute. But, what if some of us managed to escape emulating the last scene from Shawshank? Was the battle won? Do we actually get our swords then?

Diabetes
salty

That is not the point. The point is not if you can swish the sword or not. The point is whether it is made accessible to you. What is the point if it is kept in a glass case and you are only allowed to view it from afar while the seniors scream about breaking things down so much that you wonder if you are in the academy or at a construction site? Some might escape and think of these as banal issues. When I went into a different academy with my battle marks intact, a peer with a double-edged sword saw me worrying before another evaluation and asked me to take a chill pill saying“ Who worries about this stuff man? Just have fun. Do what you love. How do these marks matter anyway? “ I did not respond. Maybe it did not. Maybe it did. I thought about my days in the shadows. There were still people in the shadows. What about them? Will we always be in the shadows? I stood there like an angsty teen at the end of a Joyce short story waiting for my cue of epiphany thinking about what my uncle said to me about Diabetes before dying: “ It might not seem as threatening but it kills more than Cancer. It is a slow poison. “