I Write, Therefore I am

_ This is an ode to the writers who imagined and chronicled in not-yet places, the ones who faced the dystopia in ads. This is inspired by the many speculative fiction books that predict apocalyptic times

- Chinki Sinha

"It is an error to divide people into the living and the dead: there are people who are dead-alive, and people who are alive-alive. The dead-alive also write, walk, speak, act. But they make no mistakes; only machines make no mistakes, and they produce only dead things."
-Yevgeny Zamyatin, We

Ministry of Happiness. Ministry of Reformation. Ministry of Creativity. Ministry of Relationships. Ministry of the Past and Future. Ministry of Construction. Ministry of Restoration. Ministry of Peace. Ministry of Corrections. Ministry of Redevelopment. Ministry of Family. Ministry of Moral Affairs. Ministry of Memory. Ministry of Identity. Ministry of Immortality. Ministry of Order. Ministry of Revisions. Ministry of Facts. Ministry of Faith. Ministry of Wellness. Ministry of Elsewheres.

THERE are more but I am no longer on the beat. I lost my job as a journalist when the editor announced there would be a “happy news section” and in stories, where the copy desk would find any traces of unhappiness, they’d flag them. I had too many unhappy stories of too many sad people. I was asked to leave.

I am happy that I wasn’t taken for questioning or sent to the Wellness Centres for a scan of my brain. I think, it would have cost the exchequer a lot to send everyone for such scans. These scans were still being done by private healthcare companies and hadn’t yet been subsidised by the Super State. So, I am left with some memory and some imagination.

I write this from a place that’s on the outside, although we can sometimes go into the Shine City for coupons to collect our rations (all veg). We work under the Ministry of Development. We get some wages. Enough to survive. Not enough to live.