Worlds Within Worlds... The Human Matrix

So how does your world look like?

You work 10-12 hours a day for a reputed company in one of the big cities. Your kids study in one of the better schools and attend evening classes to learn tennis / karate / mental maths / dance / music / golf. On weekends, you hit a multiplex or get together with your friends over a drink. At least once in a year you take a holiday, international if you can afford. Every passing year, you yearn to earn more, save more and increase your assets. Each day you get up in the morning, read the newspaper, drive to office cursing the traffic, have the daily battles in the office cursing your boss and pushing your subordinates, drive back to home cursing the traffic yet again, watch television or read an occasional book and hit the bed only to start over the next day. Sprinkle a little here and there with some garnishing but this is mostly how your world looks like.

Right? Yeah, OK, so what? Isn't that how everyone's life is? Well, that's true and untrue at the same time. In our own world everyone is almost doing the same like a fish in the ocean believes that everyone in the world lives underwater or the bird in the sky believes that everyone can fly. The belief is true within 'our' world but can be completely untrue outside our world.

What does that mean? This means that each one of us get so embedded in our own worlds that we start believing it to be the reality. Remember the entry of a coke bottle in the world of the bushmen in the movie "The Gods must be crazy" or the Booker prize winning depiction of TWO worlds in "The White Tiger" by Aravind Adiga. Subsequently this concept was extensively covered in the film "The Matrix" in which the machines made the humans 'believe' in the 'imaginary' world they were living in. In reality, we don't need machines to do so. We anyways believe that to be true. We live in our own 'created' worlds and truly believe that is the only world that exist.

Don't believe me?

Let me delineate another world to you. This person has no fixed working hours or days or holidays. She can be required to get up and be ready for work at maybe 2am or 3pm or 8pm. Each time she goes out to work there is no assurance that she will return home the same day. Sometime she might be away for weeks at length. Her work involves absolute routine activities and there is seldom anything new that happens in her work-life yet she goes through multiple security checks before reporting on her job. She is expected to deliver 100% on her job each and every time. Her career span might get over in about 8-10 years. If you ask her she will not remember the last time she slept each night for more than three nights at a stretch like you do in 'your' world. She is the cabin-crew in any Airlines.

Let's move to the next world. This person offers no guarantee to his family that he will return to them when he leaves for his job each day. He has absolutely no work hours and is always at the beck and call of not just his superiors but anyone. Every moment of his worklife is spent chasing criminals, doing extensive paper work, appearing in court, providing security to VIPs and mostly in ghastly police stations. His primary job is to protect the citizens but mostly he is hated to the core by the same people he is supposed to protect. Each day he wears the same clothes to work, has no idea whether or where he will have his next meal. His life is continuously under threat and there cannot be any job which has more work pressure that his'. By now you would have guessed, he is your friendly neighbourhood Policeman.

Let's get to the extreme. This person works in a world that we shudder to even think about. Any mention of the stuff that this person handles on his job will get you disgusting stares from everyone sitting around, especially when on the dining table. He works in unimaginable environment and stinks to the core. Wonder how his family reacts when he walks in his own home. Absence of this person can wreck havoc in the world 'we' live in. Of course, he is the sanitation worker.

Now that you are able to think about the other worlds that coexist around yours, I am sure a number of these have started popping up in your subconscious - the ubiquitous film industry in which people work months at length, the all-pervading cricketers who live out of suitcases, the 365 work year of your maids & drivers, the reverse life of press workers who sleep during the day and work at nights, the world of doctors who have no option but to become totally insensitive to sentiments, the politicians, entrepreneurs...

And you really thought that your world was the one in which everyone lived...

Decipher the code, break the matrix...

Your are Neo... You are the ONE.