I must say I got really tickled when I posed this question to myself after an encounter at the check out counter in a shopping mall. The young guy at the counter wondered why I have shaved off the moustache. He was looking at my ID card that had my pic with the moustache. He commented jokingly that I might have looked better with it and asked me why I have not considered growing the moustache back. This is nothing out of ordinary right?
I wondered, for a moment, whether I am looking older without a moustache. After a delving on that for a fleetin second, I recovered well and without flinching from a comment like that and not knowing where it is heading, I blurted out that he has to get the permission from my wife to say that to me only after she gives him the permission to tell me so.He laughed off the whole encounter, but I didn’t.
The train of thoughts made me wonder how much the world has changed since my childhood days to live on this face of earth freely as you should without fear and without permissions. Nowadays, for anything you want to do, you need permission and for anything you want know you have to sign up, for anything you want to see you need to check the ratings.The things once done by others are done by you now seeking permissions at each step of the way.
Ask yourself on what is would be offered that is different once you got the permission – something free or worth a fortune, but you are required to sign up for it. Unless you do, you do not have permission to view the content. Well, I had my newspaper read by many people at the same time when I had it my hand as paper and not something like e-paper on my tablet! This has led to unintended consequences of your identity and privacy being compromised!
How about boarding a public transport. The currency that is accepted everywhere is a nuisance here as the small change is becoming scarce in availability. To ease the pain, a daily pass can be bought saving you the hassles of finding small change each and every time you board the public transport. Soon a prepaid card will be introduced to deduct the fare. You will then end up carrying a preloaded card that will take the correct fare. Showing the ticket was good enough before, but with pre-loaded cards, they need to be validated. Before boarding the train you are warned that it is a validated area and you do not have permission to board without that card. The currency you carry is no good. At some places, without them, the gates won’t even open!
All this signing up for facilities or services, all those pre-loaded cards to carry around to travel, all those electronic gadgets that demand your constant attention, all come to one thing. You must have permission to live on earth where the permission comes from someone else – may it be an organization or a group or a society or even a nation. But they are not part of me as partners, they are more or less acting as overseers controlling me with all sorts of permissions to live on this earth, yet, telling me that I am free to live on this earth.
Hope you have realized that you are a prisoner of some sort. Unless you understand the quirks of this so called freedom, it will be difficult to live peacefully on earth. One way to understand this is to get the education necessary to unravel the mysteries around you. Once you do that, you become free and move away from becoming a consumer to becoming a contributor to the well being of system that is giving you the permission to live on earth.
So what difference does it make to me, if I have to get the permission from my wife who is my partner in my life. I am lucky to say that I am not alone in the system, as I have a partner.