The Loop of Blindfolds

 –Debapriya

The blindfold of today's time isn't made from any cloth or darkness - it's woven from a light, too bright. It's more of a digital silk that is spun from endless blue light threads of our phones. Every time we feel loved, appreciated through mere texts, we live in a loop of illusion. Each time we mirror our influenced thoughts , we add a stitch; and again when we can't block a perspective which is against our morals, we tighten the knot. 

This blindfold is somewhere addicting, because it's comfortable. It plunges deep into the glittery water and we can't feel ourselves getting drenched in black ink, getting it all over our faces. We are drowning. It isn't the kind of drowning that involves a struggle or a splash; it’s a slow, rhythmic descent into a pressurized void. We are screaming, our lungs burning with the desperate need to be heard, but the sound only hits the inner wall of the glass. It reflects back at us, muffled and distorted, until our own voices become part of the noise. We are feeling claustrophobic in a world that claims to be 'borderless,' trapped in a space where the air is recycled and the light is artificial.

We merely mould into a detached world away from sense and passion. In a city that once bled for justice ,now witness a dulling disconnection. A harrowing rape that bleeds over streets, breaking through noise, often evokes our reaction as fleeting stories or into trending hashtags. We are becoming digital bystanders, watching the world burn through a filtered lens, too comfortable in our cocoons to realize that the silk is slowly suffocating our ability to care.

We hide from the touchy jagged edges of reality, much like the imagery in Sylvia Plath’s 'The Belljar'

"To the person in the bell jar,

Blank and stopped as a dead baby,

The world itself is the bad dream."

Our smartphones have become our "bell jars." We are "blank and stopped," watching the city’s agony through a curved glass screen. We see the protests at Esplanade, we see the candlelight vigils for the victims of violence, but the "bell jar" muffles the sound. We are too comfortable in our distorted, airless bubbles to realize that the nightmare is actually the reality we are ignoring.

We are being provoked - gently at first, then violently - to perform acts and hold beliefs that grate against our core morals, simply because the 'trend' demands it. We are losing the 'inside.' That private, sacred space where our true sense of justice and passion used to live is being colonized by the ghost-light of the feed. It haunts us because we can feel the void where our intuition used to be. We are being trained to react instead of reflect, to perform instead of feel. The 'moral compass' we once held is spinning wildly, demagnetized by the constant pull of the digital pole. We are drifting away from our own roots, becoming tumbleweeds in a neon desert, disconnected from the very ground that once gave us our strength. The 'Easy Ignorance' isn't just about not knowing; it’s about forgetting who we are while we are still awake.

We have been taught to fear discomfort like a disease,manslaughting,human trafficking etc. But in this "Age of Easy Ignorance," discomfort is the only thing that is real. The digital bubble,the Blindfold,offers a hollow peace which a painless, frictionless existence where we never have to confront the other or get judged. But this comfort is a lie. It seduces us and numbs us to the friction of the streets, the heat of a political debate, and the jagged reality of systemic injustice. We lose ourselves...

And we can't escape. Because once are in, we are in the loop.This almost feels inevitable .We are dying, but who the hell is going to revive us?