Utopia

We have all dreamt of utopia. A utopia of our liking. A personal utopia. Therein lies the problem. Because one man's utopia is another's dystopia. History stands witness. Ask the Jews of Hitler's Utopia or, the slaves of their master’s. People have killed and died for their versions of utopia. Wars have been fought, innocents slaughtered, revolutions brought. And for what? "Utopia", they will say. Utopia?!  Insanity! The height of human stupidity-we fight for peace, unleash dystopia to attain utopia. This sums up how flawed we are. How crooked our way of thinking is.

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Clemens was born in a plantation in the south and so were his parents. All he ever did was what the masters ordered him to. That was all he was supposed to do. That was all he was allowed to do. If he did anything else...well that was the day he wished to see. If he hoped for anything, it was to see the day when the blacks were their own masters. The day they could do anything, they wanted. The day when all were equal. Freedom. However, today was not that day. So today, he had to do whatever was asked of him. Today he was not a man, but a commodity.

  Therefore, he plucked cotton like he had done the day before and the day before that. It did not matter if he was tired or ill. If he stopped collecting cotton, he got the beating all the same. After all, to those people who claimed to be a superior race, he was not at all human. They saw no difference in an animal and the man of colour. To that so-called higher race they were but assets. Still Clemens dreamt and hoped. He saw how fair the world could be in the cotton he plucked, how fulfilling the world could be in the drops of water that quenched his thirst. And, in the eagle soaring high above how free the world could be. And, with each passing day, with each beating he got, with every breath he took he felt a day nearer, a beating lesser and a breath closer to freedom-to utopia.

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Chaya was born free. She was born to her Hebrew parents in the early 1900s. She grew up to be a successful woman. In addition, the icing on the cake, she had a nice little family. She had all she wanted. She was happy. Then one day her paradise shattered. Shattered into million little pieces. Shattered into the Nazi Germany. Hitler had become the all-powerful. His hatred towards the Semites was well known. It knew no bounds. He had turned his hatred into a national outbreak. He had made it his life's mission to wipe out the Jews from the face of the earth.

The second Great War was at its worst. Nations fighting each other. Race against race. Humanity against itself. And, it was not even the worst of it. The worst of all was being fought in the ghettos of Nazi Germany. The Jews were fighting a battle already lost-a battle against Hitler's insanity, inhumanity.

Still Chaya had not given up. Instead, she had starved for days hiding in the basement. Survived. All in the hope, that one-day the world would wake up and the nightmare be over. The world slept on. Yet she dreamt...dreamt of utopia. However, one day the nightmare usurped her. Yet, somewhere else in the ghettos, another Chaya dreamt on...of utopia.

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Suman was a girl in a man's world. She had been looked at with an eye of disappointment by her parents right from birth. More than two decades has passed since her birth, still the way people look at her, the way they treat her is not much different. It is still those judgemental eyes that look at her.  There is an air of condescension in the way society looks at her. They constantly tell her, they remind her- she is a woman in a man's world.

Just the other day, not unlike the majority of days, her boss called her in. Supposedly to "assist" him. He watched every movement she made and not due to his care for her. He could not care less for her well-being. To him everyone in the office was below him and Suman- a woman, even more so. She was an eye candy, there to satiate his hunger. The way he watched her, the sinister look in his face while he did so troubled her. She hated it. And she despised him. However, there was very little...nothing she could do. He was the boss and worse than that, she was a woman. A woman in a man's world.

            If there was, one thing she could do it was to walk out of the office. But that was no solution either, it was the same everywhere. In one job, it was the boss. In another it was the employees and in the other it was the customers. There was no escape. Not all men thought of her or women in general as a lesser being but there always was people- men who did. And the worst of it, the society thought, "Well that's normal. A man looks at a woman. Nothing wrong with that. That's a compliment and women should be happy about it." Perverse!

For all its flaws this was the world she had. This was the world she was born into. This was her world. And she hoped to change it, make it better. It certainly would not be a cakewalk but impossible it was not. Change it would.  History had taught her that much. Everything changes with time or rather time changes everything. That is to say, progress takes time. The progress humanity had made throughout history only served to strengthen her hope, her resolve to not give up on people. The story of Clemens and Chaya- the story of their unerring hope, their hope for utopia, inspired her. Her world was so much better than theirs was and it could get better still. Time had done that. And in time her world to would change for better.

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I too dream of a world better than this. A world that encompasses million little dreams to form a single utopian world. That world might have flaws, but that world shall not have inhumanity. And that world certainly won't be someone's personal utopia. It shall not just be my world but everyone else's too.