Thursday, December 28, 2006

Give me some more institution baby

There’s something about mankind and his obsession with institutions. Think about it. From the time you are born in a hospital you are in an institution, crying next to a hundred others preparing to do time. Then you go to a nursery, another institution with prospective inmates. Then you probably go to school and surprise surprise, you find yourself in another jam-packed institution. They make sure you come in on time and leave on time. They feed you books for lunch. They empty your brain and fill it with things you have no clue what the fuck they're there about. They cut down the trees and pave away your football field to make room in the institution. They even give you a uniform too. Then you run and gasp and yell and somehow manage to get out and get into another institution, college. You mingle with fellow inmates, you fall in love, you fall out of love, you fight, you rebel, you graduate into life. Then soon enough you find yourself moving towards another seemingly inevitable institution – the corporate cubicled prison. They tell you to show up on time, they threaten to fire you if you don’t, they make you fill timesheets, they make you work on weekends, they make you work on Christmas, they turn you into a mindless corporate creature who sits in the corner of the pub and slowly drowns in his drink. Years fly away and you wonder why your hair is suddenly grey, why your have a pot belly and why your entire life has passed you by. And then one day you decide to retire and stare at the wall. By then you can’t do fuckall, the institution has broken your back. The institution has won. And you don’t even know what the score is.

1 comment:

visakh menon said...

this was funny and toughtful...reminds me of the Shakespear soliloquy from As you like it "seven stages of man"
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Seven_ages_of_man
isnt he talking abt the same institutions but a good 300 or more years back...isnt suprising that life has changed little since then in the larger scheme of things...i guess the institutions have grown and turned to larger monsters but the problems of man stay the same