Not A Machine: The Radical Act of Being Human

Satyajit Ray made Hirak Rajar Deshe in 1980.

In the film, the king runs his kingdom through the Jantarmantar: a machine that turns thinking people into obedient ones. You go in complicated. You come out smooth. You lose your inconvenient questions and your inconvenient opinions and your inconvenient humanity, and you emerge, finally, useful.

When the villagers resist — when one of them refuses to enter the machine and cries out instead — the line is: নহি যন্ত্র, আমি প্রাণী। I am not a machine. I am a living being.

Ray thought he was writing about a tyrant. He was actually writing about the future.

The future where your laptop is the Jantarmantar. Where the output expected of you arrives as a calendar invite at 9am on a Monday before you have had tea. Where you are assessed quarterly on metrics that try to convert what you do into something countable — because a machine is countable, and what the system wants is for you to be countable. Where Sunday night has been quietly colonized by Sunday-night anxiety, which is just the Jantarmantar warming up for Monday.

Nobody is putting you in a machine. The machine has become ambient. It is in the phone, in the inbox, in the gentle notification that says you have 47 unread messages as if that is a neutral piece of information.

নহি যন্ত্র, আমি প্রাণী।

Not a complaint. A declaration. A quiet, specific, furious insistence on being something that cannot be fully optimized. Something that gets tired and hungry and distracted and sometimes stares out the window for no reason and needs the window.

Satyajit Ray put it on film. The T-shirt puts it on your chest.

Made to order, shipped in 5 to 7 days, free shipping. Shop Basically Shetai at machhbhat.com.