His ‘Retractable Claw’ theory is actually serious! Read on to know why.
Forgive me, for I am about to break rank writing this unusual essay about an ex-colleague who is now a friend. Knowing this is just a blog I am unmindful of my choice of words in writing this slow-burn longish descriptive essay you are about to read. So please don’t drop this on your foot. No big deal here. Take care of yourself.
To begin with, the ‘start from scratch all over again’ slogan comes from the well-stocked stables of a good-hearted conspiracy theorist who believes in the expert application of his knife-edge ‘Retractable Claw’ to all problems, imaginary or real, he faces. (What is it you’re saying? What claw?) Okay Okay, I shall clarify right away.
So here I go: The ‘start from scratch all over again’ motto is really a rap-on-the-knuckles personal approach or reproach towards redressing your mistakes and inexcusable oversights, as it were. Be that as it may, the million-dollar question is: Is it really feasible for anyone in this world to ‘start from scratch’ again? What does this motto assume to mean? It implies that the job that was not done the right way the first time around could possibly be done the right way if you started again from scratch? It might be possible to do that, who knows if one is given a second chance. Now that’s something of a total rarity because often there’s no confirmatory second chance in life as my friend is majorly experienced in that area – a second chance to make appropriate reparations or reverse some past mix-ups.
This intellectual conspiracy theorizer needs a second chance at living his life a little differently: the one which is far removed from the first misspent one. So is it possible for him to get another chance at renewing his life with good tidings? It was not entirely his fault though that the role of his karma or fate or destiny has never worked predictably in his favour. How might he be helped he wants to know? Can his dysfunctional family help their own family member that is he? Who can help him then? God the merciful? People of the world? Anyone? Jaggi Vasudev? Osho? Advaita Ashrama? Can he have an answer? Please?
The answer to the question of whether or not anyone can be given a second chance to relive his/her life is certainly not an easy nut to crack because the question potentially is something akin to solitude, a flaw, a congenital defect that often eats into your soul from inside out.
I’ve heard about this ‘start from scratch…’ slogan more often than not in the last few months than I ever did previously, thanks to my friends’ child-like enthusiasm about it. To be frank, I heard the slogan from him who I think has a ‘covert weapon’ of his own: a retractable claw of mass destruction! (‘Mass destruction’ is slightly over the top an explanation, but don’t mind it). But what can you infer from such a high-sounding presumptuous name? Your guess is as good as mine: What’s in a name. Well, sometimes it does matter, sometimes it doesn’t, depends on how you look at it. It simply infers that if you fail or flop with something in life you are expected to start the often dirty job of correcting your mistakes and this time you can fairly hope to get it right using the help of your ‘retractable claw’. Still, this can only be a hypothesis, which went on to – somewhat regrettably – work wonders on my friend’s mind’s psyche when the subject of ‘start from scratch all over again’ was first broached earlier this year, mostly by him, for I was just a mute spectator to all of that he claimed. Except that, as I soon found out, he wouldn’t “start from scratch,” never, that’s not his style he says but he likes operating his ‘retractable claw’ very much indeed. His is a blunt-force weapon that tunnels all the way through cauterizing all his life’s problems into piecemeal perspectives so that he can easily relate to each piece after piece. And in the hope of that thing happening, he can feel the ultimate orgasmic thrill for having to successfully tackle his life’s problems head-on. Short and sweet make up a treat. No doubt, he is a genre of his own.
And I can’t believe I was trying to invoke God to grant my friend a boon so that he could be able to resurrect his life with the second chance that he might have from Him! I am just kidding about the last part of what I’ve just said.
Coming Out for A Little Sun and Risotto
For all I know, he knows how to deal with his faults/mistakes in his own restless way and not feel guilty about anything in the likely event that they backfire on him. He opines that guilt of any kind wrecks the sweet anticipation of exhilaration and fulfilment. Consequences there will be, but gratification might be hard to come by so one has to grasp the chance whenever it comes and enjoy what it has to offer. That’s why he likes drinking in the pool of make-believe lovemaking. He likes it unplanned. Plans don’t work for him. He opines that unplanned errands are sweatier but definitely sweeter than the planned ones and therefore so much to look forward to; albeit every single of his hot-blooded pursuits remains unrequited and unwept over. Even so, he knows better. A hundred thousand sperms and he was the fastest to swim to the providential protectorate of the ovum! A born survivor he is.
You may ask how he knows better. Consider this: By using his ‘retractable claw’ as a cutting-edge druggy weapon to fix all his past and present mistakes and being able to put out of his mind in the increasingly fetid haze that ensues post its vigorous usage (not to mention its robust potency, oh never mind that!) on some imaginary damsel in no apparent distress, the indifferent world – he has seen and done it all. This part of his life is essentially a clever trick that is always up to his sleeve and he jolly well knows how to employ it effectively and efficiently, and whenever he feels like it! Ask him why he is so profusely fond of making such unreciprocated love? He doesn’t care why because, according to this genre-defying conspiracy mystic, “why” is a piece of terrible baggage that is best left unclaimed in the airport of life.
With the sole aim to unhinge his life’s main purpose which is to simply sustain and leave it dangling by the ‘retractable claw’ of his life, he’d once been put hard up against a wall of a terrible reprisal for his sense of prosperity and longevity, or life expectancy as we jokingly put it, getting affected. Call it as a vice or virtue, he sees everything conspiratorially, and by having a gifted paranoiac suspicious mind he can easily be known as a master of the culture that breeds conspiracy theories of the highest order. The other side of the proverbial coin of his personality is that he is as normal a single guy of virtues as you can get.
For example, according to one of his theories, World Wars I and II have served as critical turning points for economically advanced power-hungry nations of the world to create a market for mass consumption of food and other industry-produced goods among the world population and, therefore, converting socialist/communist countries into economically-interdependent capitalist ones (read free-trade, free-market blah, blah, blah) was, one thinks, not very difficult a narrative to get the hang of what he really means by saying what he says.
His stack of byzantine conspiracy speculation consists of these: Pearl Harbour attack was faked, meaning the United States knew about the attacks in advance and so wanted it to happen to enter World War II, the JFK assassination plot, Princess Diana’s assassination was actually carried out by British Intelligence agents at the monarchy’s behest (everyone knows this theory though); Watergate scandal, CIA was behind John Lennon’s killing, 9/11 attacks that brought the twin towers of WTC buildings down may have been carried out by controlled demolition and so forth.
Though these theories, if not all but most, may seem nonsense and are pretty much available online, his talent is rare, especially in espousing brave and provocative theories with such impassioned orally expressive analyses that’ll definitely nag you to ask necessary questions about the nature of the nation-states, especially of the so-called West and its immense political and economic power to alter the course of human history. Thus spake the expert Zarathustra.
One of the reasons why his social life is negligible has to be his ability to angling out ‘conspiracy’ in almost everything you see or read. He hardly ever was, for that matter, sociable by nature. He rarely ever smiles; he’s a little groggy maybe but never punch-drunk weepy about the way his life is treating him daily...his life reads like the hallowed pages of Charles Dickens novels “Oliver Twist” or “David Copperfield”. Having partaken dollops of inspirational readings from such all-time classics, my friend too plods along being cast-adrift alone in the wilderness of apparently endless time.
Be it politics, women, science, or anything under the sky he knows how to spin a conspiracy theory around these and undress them in the nude. He feels that Earth girls are easy (to get); if in case he thinks that he is from some laidback outer space managing to look like the exact copy of Jeff Goldblum!, just perish the thought. This unique human cannot differentiate the Gold from Blum while Jeff cuts cleanly away. Whether you agree with him or not is a different ruse altogether, but every conspiratorial angle of his sounds so unbelievably true and so-cool that you hardly ever will come into disagreement with the way he speaks about the issues concerning mankind today. That sums up his modus operandi and modus vivendi. Mind you, one is not talking about any half-baked cynical ideas that can be googled from the Net, but fully formed satirical ones that croon lexical tones of great conspiracy theories of his into anyone’s ears who’d be interested to hear them out and not feel faint. His is no foolish talk.
His Eternal Bachelorhood Plans
Look there and look deeply. There! There! Did you see that? His ‘retractable claw’ is right there but merely a suggestive notion of it exists now! The man has committed his mistakes (everybody does so who cares!) but fortunately, has recuperated from certain unwelcome consequences he had had to face – all because of what he was previously accustomed to believe in. Thanks to his male chauvinist ‘retractable claw’ ideology that had for more than once backfired on him with brute intensity, but coincidentally, it definitely did him well too. His bachelorhood self-survived. We’ll now see how.
The naked truth is he still has an unflinching truck with his own life: a vulnerable existence without a better-half is the toughest experience possible that a man can endure. When you’ve become a most eligible adult (MEA) to get married and went past the marriageable due date or expiry date or whatever it is called, without the company of a wife and in his case the absence of even parents and siblings, life portents hell, pure unmanageable hell. Ask married men, they know! Apparently, he is still surviving the fact that he’s not wanted in the arranged marriage market anymore, possibly because he is well past the marriageable age and girls, according to him, have stopped being keen on aged singles like him, due to reasons which are best known only to them. Possibly because of this reason alone why his, sort of, the last line of defence has come to be known as ‘retractable claw’ and using it the way he wants to. As things stand with him now, he still likes playing by its elegiac rules.
Even though he continues to have the ‘truck’ even today (and justifiably so), his sense of days and years sometimes seesaws between sanity and insanity. Being naturally restless on such a make-or-break issue, he sometimes laments about the way he lives his, sort of, miserable existence, but beyond that cold hard fact that rests on him lightly he’s able to shut his mind out from the subject of marriage and the potential flights of fancy one are troubled by when one has a female company for consummation, not to mention all other potential odd jobs it brings. These are his words, not mine.
His LinkedIn profile is expunged thanks to his contentious viewpoints, Facebook profile never existed and never will, and his Twitter doesn’t bleat (Tweet?) and his WhatsApp hardly makes any noise. Blogging, travelling and frugal living are the only escape routes from the persistent scratch in the tenderloins of monotony as is cranking out an article or two to instil representative forms of propriety within his being.
This kind of naturally befuddled mind-set doesn’t easily subside to proper clarity because it really does take a lot of time to undo one's past mistakes, and ‘start from scratch all over again’ slogan could not be his idea of having to redeem himself at the altar of his good conscience. Such is the life of this conflicting eternal bachelor; he may have his feet firmly on the ground but his head seems to be always in the clouds – always at loggerheads over his personal choice to remain a lifelong celibate and longing for a significant other. That doesn’t mean he is weak in character as being desirous for a spouse doesn’t make one. But, I think, it’s quite natural to be a little confused about oneself in the face of an insurmountable family problem he has been facing in the stark absence of good relatives, parents, and well-wishers in the community where he comes from. He forsook, a long time ago, the luxury of other people’s interest in his personal affairs; he said it was not worth it.
I can never know how it feels when one remains unmarried for life; maybe it feels pathologically wretched, unwanted, and universally lonely when there is no one to talk to and pour your heart out, with not even the loving presence of his parents or siblings in the house. Parents are dead and siblings live reclusively and separately. His destiny was unkind to him in ways that hardly can anyone comprehend as to what really went wrong with him during his growing up years back in his fabled hometown in the south. Equally, his life’s denial for a wife let alone kids, not even a sort of romantic companion to hobnob with, is a harsh reality that, to be frank, hardly ever appeases anyone who had found himself luckier in the jurisdiction of matrimony and its inherent prospects.
While correlation is not causation, it seems to me that the business of staying alive surely had turned out to be one unwelcome proposition for him. But he badgers on, regardless. By not having any type of companionship, he continues to remain perpetually pesky and restless as it must be psychologically very upsetting to live without anyone or anything to call home. And would you say conspiracy theories cannot germinate in the minds of such lonely folks on whom spinsterhood was more or less imposed upon and not because of their choice to remain single? Living in solitary conditions is akin to being almost on a daily basis totally unloved and uncared for and people like him sure can have the uncanny ability to conjure up excellent conspiracy theories, and one way or another, they’d get a kick out of the chance to assert their importance from their own angle of vision and understanding, which isn’t really typical of them. According to me, he is one good epitome (or casualty or victim) of the two big little things called hard luck and indifferent Destiny that have been stacked up against his share of good chances in the whole wide world. Even so, I can’t help thinking hard as to what really turned out badly with this apparently hard-on-luck guy back in the time when he was little and growing up amongst his kith and kin? Understandably, he likes faulting nobody at all for the plight he is in; really so conscientious of him to show some emotional deftness and understanding on certain things, especially of the kind of tough situation he grapples with each waking day of his life. Destiny had it written; but I can’t help but wonder in a pathetic way what it has written for him, ultimately. Only one can never know that.
Often times he becomes so totally distraught about the way things stand that even today, he is in his mid-40s, he still runs the risk of easily getting branded as a hopeless dupe… the one who is not of marriage material, maybe he is a commitment-phobe, and the idea of rearing a family could be anathema to such highly self-satisfied but all-knowing individuals who couldn’t care less for female company. By the same token, his ‘escapades to the stars’ or his ‘navel-gazing’ activity, however, reveals a different set of narrative: the outcome of which when it comes out in the open forces you to feel nothing but feel sorry for him. He does get deeply struck by the shock of loneliness the hard-core spinsters like him – as we lucky married ones presume in our own sweet terms – punishingly deserve. But things like this cannot easily be explained despite the best of intentions. So, obviously, bachelors like him know better than married men what loneliness is and what it can do to you. If truth be told, I think he hopes to do well for himself by turning a different corner: the kind of corner that essentially has the power to alter the course of his kind of humanity and his foreseeable future, to culminate into some kind of fruition that can serve him well given the lifelong reality of no one to care or feel for him. No, marriage is not on the cards, not even taking a chance at it. Like Dr. APJ Abdul Kalam and former PM of India Mr. Atal Behari Vajpayee, and Mr. Ratan Tata, he’s straightforwardly categorical about being allegiant to their alma mater ‘United Bachelors’ Syndicate’ for life. They never acquiesced to what my hermetic friend says the stigmata of impedimental liabilities that the institution of marriage carries.
This Monk Too Has Sold His Ferrari
One of the most important things that influenced him to see the reality is that his more-than-rigid, unbending way of life has pushed him hard to spare handsome money at the bank, on which he would deservedly sustain himself for life, as he revealed it to me once. With no apparent zeal to spend it recklessly or without giving a proper thought is completely absent in him, he is now in good stead. He dons a thinking cap when it comes to money matters. Most likely, it feels great for him to finally be free from certain burdens that sometimes life treats you wrong, so he’s prepared himself for any critical occasions that may rub him the wrong way.
Despite how passive, indifferent his life has been during all his growing up years, the sense of reality somehow dawned quite at an early stage on this perennially lonely man. In a world that can be heartless, savage, and cutthroat and all at the same time, especially to eternal bachelors like him who never would/could get into wedlock, he has repeatedly outshone very many of his peers suffering from the same ever-present bachelorhood pangs involving the complex depravity of the fulfilling cherries of female perspective or any legitimate offline relationship. They’re the rare living proof of angsty men who’d forever be without women. By being a born survivor of an earlier serene generation, he can be more than what meets the eye. His successes may have been few and far between, but his failures are equally good to ponder upon as they can serve as learning lessons to anyone who is curious about how failures serve as stepping stones towards success. In contrast, his peers have already been written off and doomed because they took failures to their hearts. These fellows con, steal and move about unseen to survive and live a toxic life of uselessness and blame other people’s successes for their own lack of proper attitudes. But not my friend.
Unable to acclimate to today’s widespread economic crises and propensities of the money-loving materialism that modern life every so often throws at him, he survives as good as a modern-day indigenous Monk would – a Dalai Lama of his generation, no less than that, and lives in enlightened nirvana far away from a childhood homestead where he once lived with his beloved mother, his crooked father and his helpless siblings who were all there together enjoined in a loving familial embrace. This monk too has sold his Ferrari, though quite a long time back, and came away almost empty-handed after his mother’s death.
Hazy Memory of a Long-Lost Childhood
This comrade of Leftist leanings, a recent friend, has oodles of natural intellect to steer himself away from any servile torments that life manhandles him with. He lives a long, lonely, and desolate existence without a spouse or a family to boot and has loads of heart-aching stories to tell about an earlier time he still misses so much. No juicy tell-alls, but mournful stories about longing and belonging to a once-beautiful homestead where his mother died leaving him unloved and unwanted by his father. After her unexpected demise, someone guardian-like within the family post-haste announces that one of his own beloved children should go away and never return, ever; others can stay in the house if they wish to else the main door is slightly ajar for anyone to take the hint.
Quite before the time when family matters came to such a pass, my tragic friend had already made up his mind to renounce all things that even remotely sounded like family. With his mother gone, his sister somehow married and got away and his brother remained estranged, unconcerned, and morally bankrupt, he became emotionally broke and utterly helpless. His stay-at-home brother wanted money and the house more than anything else. Their probably manic-depressive father never cared about anything as he was absolutely indifferent to his own family affairs until the day when his death intervened to ease matters a little bit for his three surviving children. There are some deep wounds that even Time won’t heal. My friend has plenty of them all over his scarred soul that perhaps will never get a chance at healing. In his case, tragically, Time has always been found sickeningly wanting and as far as its much-vaunted healing powers were concerned, it surely duped him. Sadly, what remains now with him is the bleak memory of a long-lost childhood when his mother was alive and things in the family were quite okay.
With parents dead and gone many years ago, he and his siblings are all this old-school 47-ish socialist sickle-and-hammer personage has as a family. Therefore, to call this something resembling a family albeit completely estranged from one another is a complicated issue in itself. His brother and sister are still emotionally divided in their narrow-minded selfish demands for family property and savings. Chances are they will remain alienated forever with no possible hope to reset back to those golden times and remembering those blissful memories of the long-lost upbeat childhood years. Now and then, an occasional friend or two drops by at his rented pad, but their presence offers very little to console him out of his almost lifelong affliction of loneliness, sibling rivalry issues, and his own private insatiable misery for love and being loved. Yet to survive like an upright man with all moral values intact, he looks up to no one in particular – no heroes, no saints, no icons, and not even role models for him – but only at the practical/sustainable succour of life and seldom the spiritual. Little wonder then that his first instinct is personal sustenance: food for the stomach, books for the mind, and a leased roof screaming above his head. Everything else is just secondary.
Furthermore, he regularly uses his professional Telescope to gaze at the stars and profusely indulges in some exciting Anthony Boudain-inspired bachelor cooking. Pursuits he very much likes doing for himself and his sorry-ass sympathetic acquaintances that come over to stuff themselves in their faces at his rented bachelor pad. He enjoys cooking very much, but doubly enjoys sharing his homemade broth too. He is lean and agile and does not have any shopping plans. Except with little carbon footprints here and there, he doesn’t even believe in taking too much space on this planet either.
Purely as a matter of habit though, the scourge of his adulthood, his ‘retractable claw’ that is snaps out every once in a while but quietly retracts; maybe his late-night licentiousness or day-time sojourns has long ceased to exist now. This pestering little botheration can be only a biologically engineered normal human 90-degree inclination he can’t resist the fleshly urge to have it used forthright and also get a chance to feel a little lighter as a result.
When all of a sudden he becomes carnally desirous of seeking an ultimate feeling of abandon (of the perfunctory motivations kind), it so happens that his self-control over such a libidinous undertaking depletes drastically, and as he finds himself giving up to the whims and fancies of his untamed claw clamouring for a boundless release - notwithstanding the complete absence of the aphrodisiacal Petticoat Lane, he hems and haws erratically... often dancing around in his spotless off-white mundu with the carefree abandon of lost youth in love!
He knows that he might run the risk of getting booby-trapped or get ensnared on a steely nail of his somewhat morally conscientious heart-wall before being put to some penalizing atonement task to cleanse his soul all over again, so he cools down. Ever since his last few experiences of forbidden exploits, the fear of indignity and guilt is now the key to prevent all his nonsensical stuff from happening. Fear is always the key. Fear of getting tangled in the mess of his own making that he cannot get out of has put paid to some of his overzealous advances recently. He didn’t succeed, for the nth time now. For fear that his carnally disappointed Anaconda-like ‘claw’ every so often summons up a brute mind of its own and performs a nasty trap-door trick or two on him and from which he can’t let himself get off the hook, is at least high up on his atonement list though. Better be, buddy.
By and by, one feels he knows better than what his last time’s perilous yearning had put paid to his sense of unearned freedom – one that soundly chastised him and brought him down on all fours being prayerful and despondent till thy kingdom come. As things stand now, he might fare better from such waywardness of his, but no pointless indulgences for him anymore, he assures me. “No worries on that one, mate,” he’d speak out laughingly, and between saying funny things and serious things he’d chortle away to himself. Make no mistake; he knows how to live life often on his own terms and all the possibilities entailed by simple, conscious, and happy existence.
Arguably, one of the world’s unsung conspiracy theorists now lives a charmed life in the company of his books on political psychology and ideology and self-help management journals of the Peter Drucker kind. Bachelor cooking is the order of the day, and with a sniffing throng of freeloaders in tow to partake of his homemade gravies and parathas, he is delightfully welcoming of them. Among the things that keep him company is a connected laptop (he succumbed to keyboard fetishism years ago) for writing like a true-blue conspiracist, bathroom singing till the heavens grumble and shower, hanging out with a pair of heavy-duty binoculars, and a gargantuan telescope set at an aroused angle for periodic navel-gazing purposes...err…actually to check out the dirty laundry that the sky has to offer! All this pretty much sums up his energetic thrum of life.
After selling his not much sought-after Ferrari, the monk is just being sagaciously worldly-wise, mortally alive and brimming with comic pizzazz, nothing more, and nothing less.
Life is treating him fairly stellar. He just hopes it lasts longer than it normally does. By self-adjusting to his share of rough patches and bumps here and there, he wants to bond with the best that life has to offer. A life that is pacifying, soothing, relaxing. Peace!
By Arindam Moulick
4846 words in all.
Alternative titles for the blog:
1. A Conspiracy Theorist’s Narcissism Epidemic
2. Guy, Interrupted
3. The Story of a Conspiracy Theorist Extraordinaire
4. Hail, Toast, and Cheers to a Conspiracy Theorist
(Written between July and August ‘18)