Gilded cage

No one is really free inspite of their vehemently claiming so. Everyone walks around with a cage around them, all at once serving the dual purpose of restricting and protecting them. Like God, the rule of law seems like a sort of distant irrelevant reality until the moment of crisis arrives. Then it is the only shelter around from miles and miles of barren, unforgiving lands.

I found this out very recently when I was nearly swindled in a used car deal and managed to get justice through some rules I had hardly paid attention to before. I was glad that someone had foreseen the exact predicament that I found myself in and had ensured that there was a fair way out of it for me. We spend our happy-go-lucky lives thinking that the sun will always shine so very bright. The truth is that the sun does get blotted out much too regularly and that we can thank our lucky stars that someone had the vision to plan for it all.

These are not the laws of God that I am talking about. Its the laws of men, of civilized nations and borne out of great minds, of hundreds of sheets of paper where every possible scenario has been played out and there is an exact specification of how it is to be handled. I think every constitution is an infinite novel: mix and match, pick and choose and you'll have a billion possible combinations and a trillion interesting stories. Right from the day I was born in a hospital in Calcutta and my name was noted down on a piece of paper to the hour of my death when a doctor will pronounce me lost to the material world, someone has thought of every plausible or implausible mishap that might waylay me and that to me is a very amazing achievement. I tend to get dazzled by the flashiness of technology and swayed by the deep reaching impact of art. I tend to forget that the only entity that plans (maybe imperfectly) for a safe and happy life for all good individuals in a quiet, unobtrusive way is neither art nor science or not even God. It is the gilded cage we all choose to live in but rarely appreciate enough, called the law of the land.