If there is to be a conspiracy theory, let it be about how the civilisation was mounted externally into Earth from somewhere out there. This idea was essentially an act of aggression. A simple and sustainable model of survival was disturbed in its infancy and replaced with another. An idea that perpetuates itself through the constant urge to improve, innovate and push further. Nothing is good enough and there is no day like tomorrow. The tomorrow that never comes. Narcotics, business, culture, everything owes its existence to this open, empty and fraudulent promise. Even consciousness is locked into this loop. At least in the form that it is channeled through beings in bodies. Sketching the conspiracy further, the idea was transmitted to our atmosphere by radio and once it was in the air all we had to do was breathe.

The idea is ripe for conspiracy-seeking because it doesn't add up, it doesn't seem stable but has been a part of our fabric for so long. It can't be rationalised by history, experience or biology. It is a purely alien idea that suddenly appeared in our midst and then strangely also became the central idea. Without the idea of civilisation, we wouldn't be restless, paranoid and be so anthropometric. These are defining conditions to forever lock us in the loops of progression and recursion. There has been no reportage about the ascent of this idea. Maybe this happened before the development of culture and language, but that is purely speculative. It could also have happened in the silence of the night and the noise of our dreamworld. We have been confused ever since, not knowing whether we misremember a dream or remember a phenomenon that should be shared and reported.

The idea of civilisation has some more characteristics which might be more obvious. The details can be matched either way. So if the idea is to improve and be more sophisticated, then both the idea of domesticity and colonies on the moon make sense. There is no prescription of choices only a pattern and hinting mechanism for making choices. Potentially infinite things can fit. The myth of the prevalence of autonomy exists but in fact only the tyranny of civilisation prevails.

Urban environments have a chronic lack of confidence. They have instincts and sometimes they have insights but they do not have the drive to develop these insights into things that happen, things that become. If anything streets and neighbourhoods have the confidence to become divisive, plain and deadening. As an experiment if a child is brought up only with featureless suburban streets to see and walk amidst, maybe she will not even develop the required emotional and analytic depth to be termed human. To develop complexity and depth in our minds, we need to see people like us survive in different conditions and accommodate them within our porous minds.

Because urbanity has progression and self-improvement as one of its central ideas, cities never have a moment of peace. They are taught to constantly replace that which works with that which only might. In this pursuit, city-dwellers feel pulled in different directions, feel forced to forge multiple allegiances and basically tread all over their own unspent desires. Confidence is the forceful urge, the flow of passion with no blockage, the surety of a position. Confidence fails to develop on city streets. Rather, streets become pools of insecurity, anger and frustration. Cloaks of largesse wrap these base instincts. So, sometimes people seem complete, balanced and forward-thinking. But they only seem so.

If some mayor of some metropolis wins an election on a platform that promises confident, clear-headed youth to the city, she will have to really struggle. He will have to think hard and evolve a methodology which delivers.

First, she will have to ban discussions and dialogue on the future of cities either in the art, architecture or geography and social-science fields. there should be no analysis, no critiques, no extrapolation, no recommendations and demands for reform. Then maybe the city can be at peace. Then maybe city-dwellers will not feel stretched and pulled in different directions. Then maybe they will be able to forge together a psyche, not scratched, mutilated and maimed. Then, maybe a true sense of the guiltless post-human, animal condition will emerge.

Second, she will have to outlaw activism. No dissent will be possible, no conter-points, arguments, visions of a better future which want to challenge the status-quo and produce false hope and dissatisfaction in people. Without hope, a genuine despair will be possible which dumps us into the depths of experience without any distraction, without any hope of getting away. In pure despondence, depression can emerge. Depression is a single-state solution to the cacophony of the head, to the united-nations of the psyche. Nothing like depression to clear the shroud of confusion from the head.

Third, she will have to declare nationhood, independence from the nation as a loose coalition of antibodies which is left impotent, listless, directionless. To break away from that nation, grease and pepper-spray needs to be applied generously on all the joints which hold it to the mainland. With periodically regular application of grease and pepper-spray at the joints (although they are made of platinum, palladium and concrete) they will weaken and give away. Declaring nationhood will give a focus to the civic base, give them something to die for. Find a solution to their own unique problems instead of following a national programme. It will go against the whole received wisdom about nations, about unity, about collectivisation of resources for greater benefit. Without that baggage the schools and colleges in the new city as a nation will be very forthright and upbeat. They will be brimming with fresh ideas and hopping the graves of all the national heroes.

After she does these things, she might still find young people who are henpecked, browbeaten and unconfident. These people should be left in peace. They should be given a chance to be infected by the public mood. Fewer and fewer of such people will be found.

In the present arrangement, confidence also fails to build up because of the massive distortions of history and urban folk-lore. The sun of the past always shining brightly and brilliantly in untarnished perfection. History always portrays her actors as confident individuals with great clarity in their heads. To trick history's paralysing touch, the city in its present time needs to resort to role-play and invest in alternative histories. Alternative histories can of course be written by anyone, but are written best by young pornographers. These artists write of history with a very light pen and with fragile strokes they deftly write of people in all their shades of perversion and notoriety and of course also heroism. It is a burden off the head to read such histories, it is great explosion of confidence. People behave in uninhibited ways and by the time our three recommendations get implemented, the world is still liveable.

When cities started calling themselves cities, the first thing they created and spread in the air was the phenomenon of arbitrary risk. Anyone, anywhere could get attacked at any time. The kind of attack, the nature of the aggression was variable but everything else was not. Death was certain. So while the human race was immortal, fearless and immune in their settlements before the dawn of the urban age, cities brought death and decay. Not only were a thousand new ways to die born but also as many ways to live degraded, decadent lives. Before cities were born, too many mechanisms for mutilating the psyche, too many ways of playing with darkness weren't there. These have been the innovations of urbanity.

When the task at hand was to create some prototypes of power games that could be played, men first thought of entrapping women. Through religion, history, brute force and corruption the entire sex was successfully trapped. Religion was born only when cities arose, before that there were only notions of the sacred and notions of a cosmos in which humans were smaller than the specks of shit that ants excrete. But this did not help, so religion came up with the idea of the man in the sky who was pathogenically needy, judgemental and small-minded. Religion made sure there were enough knives in its arsenal of arms to stab the female sex in the heart and be done with it. History also came in aid then, and it became the smoke and mirrors trick beyond comparison. So not only was a common story of human experience shared, it was carved on hard stone that weathered the corrosive nature of time, people with other stories running in their head were called liars and paraded through libraries naked. And if this history said anything it said things which implicitly supported the claims of religion. Only the compulsions of free market economics and warfare allowed women to live with dignity in the city.

Else they were always the forms floating around in the shadows. Men swim around their fishbowls trying to find meaning in times of disproportionate cynicism, and women refuse to help because nobody asks them. They can help by telling stories loudly into the public address system. Stories which haven't been told, which are to be translated afresh from the ancient bloodstream trafficking in their bodies. Stories hidden from the lies of history.

A long, long time ago gender was a fluid and porous kind of role-playing. It was circumstantial, contextual and opportunistic. In the morning you could be a woman and in the evening a man, if that worked out better for you. Role-play depends on a give and take mechanism. One question is if you can give enough to the role by playing it. The other question is if you can get something out of playing the role for yourself. A resolution of both the questions can lead to a quality enactment that is cathartic and expressive for both the actor and the audience.

Such was the actuality of gender. Then it was broken, brushed away and denied. It was made into a construction, denied the possibility of play. All deviations became queer. Perversity could always be sustained at a price.

After the early days of urban culture, everything got frozen into the moulds which were initially deployed only as scaffolding. Cities killed the chaotic, poetic interplay between contexts and moments. It imposed structures as if they were gospel and backup up their claims with religion, history and brute force. If there is anything to be mourned, we should mourn the tendency of the present city to be a low-resolution image that aspires to achieve itself fully.

The inhuman, ruthless has become like the default mode of people here. It is not enough to embrace humanism, because the human is not a complete idea. It claims an exalted high ground and forever lives in the pathos of failing itself. Because of instructions, prescriptions, inscriptions we live everyday suffocated by our own insanity. There is no sandbox, there is no acceptance of our stink, stains, dents. There is no state-sponsored universal right to therapy. The strands of insanity in our DNA coil and recoil to such degree to become like wound springs with immense potential energy. If we ask people to change, to buckle-up, to rise above their base tendencies we need to give them options for the safe extolling of their psychic excreta. You cannot just say that "private spaces are open, do anything behind closed doors but in the public please be nice." Privacy is a privilege, living under watchful parental eyes all the time can be very tiring. How can we expect frustrated, exhausted spirits to play fair?

Insanity has been unfairly demonised, it needs to be accepted as another kind of spirit-season. In insanity lie all the answers of things which perplex us, which seem counter-intuitive, which confound. Instead of forcing the insane to be the nectar of closed-door therapy sessions and out-patient departments of hospitals, we need to make it legal dinner-table conversation. The imposition of normalcy on unstable minds produces violence. It is the flip side. In inculcating pride of the mad, society will fracture itself and crack open its own charades. Gender violence is misanthropic and and not just misogynic. Gender discord is a political strategy to pulverise dissent.

The traffic is not out on the streets alone, it is in the pattern and flow of thoughts in the head. If anything, city-dwellers think too much. Partly we are forced to think and partly we do it spontaneously. Nothing is left unthought, raw, unprocessed, undesigned. Carrying forward the logic of progression, the pioneers who will live on the Moon will have to think even more. For thinking is filling-in of sorts, the kind which does not easily become a habit or operating rule. Like the filling-in we do when we watch films. The filling-in I am referring to has a much more difficult pattern. Recognising it and starting to talk about it will take us some time.

In films we fill-in the jump from scene to scene, the off-screen motion which can't always be shown. We save film makers work and in effect activate the craft of filmmaking. If it were not for the eager and active filling-in by us, there would be no concept of film time. The filling-in we do in urban situations is maybe for reasons more closely linked to survival. In the times of the founding, when settlements were getting clustered together and cities were being born, the founding fathers had a slightly different picture in their heads. They pictured cities to be more like a media space for settlements to operate and exchange. Cities weren't supposed to be entire synthetic worlds but more of a layer of media to allow pre-existing worlds to transact. The plan wasn't to do large scale policing but to expect for natural self-balancing, a kind of equilibrium to emerge. The plan didn't work. Once put in place city spaces wanted to become everything. There was a resistance to being contained in a specific role, the idea of being a media specifically for worlds existing already was not taken very well. The arrogance that emerged when streets connected with streets and junctions emerged couldn't accept very well a priority given to settlements based on history, or bona fide ethnicity.

And so citizens of the prototype cities started to think a lot. They thought about everything, that which was there, that which was not there, that which was there at one time but was no longer there. Things that happened, things that didn't happen, things which could happen. There was never enough time to finish all the conversations that were started. There was never enough time to travel all the trails of thought which were walked upon. This overthinking led minds to be able to talk to each other just by being proximal. There was no need to open your mouth and say anything. Just by hanging around and being close enough, their skins talked to each other. Presence was no longer needed in the social sense, bodies just needed to move around, conversations just needed to be experienced not participated in. This was the filling-in that started happening. The social was a kind of stand-in for itself. People pictured large sets of inter-connected and inter-dependent societies that constituted cities in their heads. But this was a false image, actually very small groups or sometimes isolated entities were living in dense settlements and people's skins talked to each other spontaneously. The traffic of men, materials and thought seeded the city as the surface and space for a media to operate.

Traffic of other kinds also exists. I suggest that we look into the traffic of contraband. Contraband has always existed. Or at least since when law was fabricated and put into place overnight to cement some relationships and disrupt others. Things that people just did suddenly became illegal and negotiations had to be processed to figure out a middle ground. In fact this was the beginning of business also. The activity promoted with cooperation from the city to produce capital and organise the populace. Initially business was almost entirely sponsored by the state and was seen as functions that fulfilled desires of the state. The state wants access to capital. The state wants populations to be accessed en masse at any give time for mobilisation purposes. So the state sponsored businesses through legal largesse. All forms of private capital outside business was outlawed. So extortion, contract killing and prostitution which were popular pursuits at a time became niche interests. Children grew up aspiring to do business and not kill for money. These were all fabrications of the business-friendly legal system. Business was enshrined as a prime bona fide activity because it offered the maximum range of benefits to the state.

Today, business is still a central activity for us. It creates all the circuits of traffic. Motor vehicles crawling around on our highways, ships carrying free stuffed toys for grocery shoppers across the oceans. In all this dynamism and elaborate machinery lurk other things which we actually want to talk about. The traffic of waste thrives with the movement of men, materials, thoughts because wherever the circuits of traffic travel things get left behind. From shit to soiled bedsheets to thrown away glass pendants to furniture hacked away because it reminds too much of evening parties now past.

When signals cross in the air, sometimes failures can look like intervals. Endgames can seem like intermissions and hope can seem like a simple default emotion. In most cases road accidents are difficult to predict, preempt and control. Accidents are of course multi-variate situations. It doesn't matter whose fault it is, everyone suffers the damage. Such accidents have the potential to be understood as natural disasters. Unexplainable in terms of causal factors, these accidents seem to be spontaneous and wilful.

City life is governed by public relations exercises. At the time truckloads of cash used to be moved every month from the municipality to the offices of the film industry. Mayors around the world realised that if there was going to be any sustained idea of a civilisation, prototypes will have to be created by the cultural operators soon. So they didn't just fund all the films based in cities around the world, conveying that stretchability, that infinite playground of potential of city life, but they wrote all the scripts as well.

Municipalities then employed many more writers than the film industry. There was a special building which had a long unbroken factory floor like space. Hundreds of writers sat there and wrote day and night. Some wrote mysteries, some wrote romances, some wrote political thrillers. But all of them showcased city life as a charmed background which was glamorous, larger than life, rich with stories and histories, with beautiful men and women and the stage for the most daring crimes ever. In fact when crime syndicates were experiencing a lull in ideas, they did not know any more what to do, what to scheme, they watched these movies. It has kept them busy ever since (and I hear there are still movies they discuss with each other ever now and then).

Disappointment is embedded deep within the idea of public relations. Because it is generally accepted that when a certain idea is bankrupt, another one needs to be fabricated to take its place. This replacement, swapping is the core function of public relations. Movies were the perfect conduit for this activity. And the offices of public relations attached to the numerous municipalities around the world were very successful in this activity. Good writers were well paid. In some cities the entire public transport system was free because of the revenue from the secondary sales of the scripts to the movie industry and the mafia. Once in a while the mafia also got scripts commissioned. So say if they wanted to burgle The Louvre instead of doing their own research and detailing a plan they would just commission the municipality in Paris to do it and they would turn-in a magnificent script with brilliant detail and plausible events. The police never made this connection but there were at least a whole decade of successful heists that were pulled off with the municipal scriptwriters.

All of this stopped when the film-industry crashed world over. People suddenly stopped going to theatres. On probing it was found that something new was happening. Someone had discovered the world behind the sheen of movies and other works of the public relations offices. This discovery was made by mistake and for a long time no body believed it. They loved movies so much that to accept them as anything but what they stood for was sacrilege. There was mass grieving, people burned posters of movies, statues of film stars were demolished. But what was the discovery? How was this de-sheathing done? It wasn't something circumstantial like some act of peeking into the municipal images division and finding a room full of writers typing away. It was something else. One of the biggest productions of recent years was being screened in a lavish theatre. Theatres then always had casinos on campus. In the middle of the film they accepted bets on the potential directions that the narrative could take. There was active and passionate betting. And with open and legal gambling the general understanding was that nobody had special privilege, no inside information, no secrets. But one day when this guy was placing a bet he got a glimpse of the distortion in the system. Although the municipality facilitated the gambling and they even lost enough bets here and there, they never lost money. At this particular moment this guy wanted to place a million currency notes on what the officials knew to be a winning bet. And they hesitated, made it difficult, brought in as much red tape as as possible and then finally just refused in desperation. A million of their currency was a very large sum, roughly equivalent to their entire annual budget. At that precise moment our man, the whistle-blower realised what was happening. He realised that a big victory, a massive campaign was impossible in this system. It was more a question of making peace with a specific kind of defeat.

It was more about coming to terms with the level of your disappointment.

Friendships in this city are fragile and vacuous. Either my friends are never around me or they are there and they are feeling empty. The city is a special weapon. A weapon of mass destruction, maybe. But not really. It is not really mass, maybe mass-less destruction would be more like it. Bodies are left intact, but everything else is distorted. So we can call cities circuit bending machines. The circuit is intact, but the electricity flowing through it is bent, distorted and maimed. So the weaponry of the city streets empty you out cyclically. More like flush you out, finger-tickle your guts to force-puke out.

So friendship cannot be performed across absences and emptiness. It needs to be contained in a label and set to a possibility for sporadic performance. Friends are bodies which are tolerated most of the times because they are sometimes friendly.

In the flat landscape of dry, emotionless circuitry, things get jammed. There is no lubricant, no saline for the transference of vaccines, like spirit-vaccines, nutrition and substance. People remain empty for very long periods of time and then they start wondering about the meaning of life. Times such as these, when the meaning of life is the subject of speculation, people talk quite often of spirituality. They talk of raspberries coated with chocolate sauce in the same way. In exalted ways, in a manner similar to a public relations executive.

But if at these moments if there are friends around, instead of exalted talk there is a comfortable silence. Because friendship is in such short supply, such silences are sorely missed. Friendship is so easily understood as a comfortable silence but that is only one side of it. Let's say the platonic side. The other side is pretty nasty. The other side is where friendship becomes other things. It becomes rivers of blood, quicksand and burnt temple deities all at once. On that other side the nights of faithful friendships bear fruit. Keys of secret chambers in the head are shared. Approximations of the dimensions of eternity are drafted. Sometimes also things go wrong. Pits are dug which are way deeper than the easily-hop-over-them-kinds. Such pits have to be crossed routinely in the life on the other side. So when that happens to you, and you do not easily do things like that, you fall in. On the other side, people make quite a big deal about those who do not make it. The tragedy of those who fall, the ones who didn't make it across the stormy streams of friendship.

Friendship as a fallen fruit is also something. Eating fallen fruit is considered the most ethical way of eating. Neither is there the coarseness of agriculture, nor the cruelty of eating other animals, nor the synthetic techne of the factory. Fallen fruit tastes best, it tastes like a missile. Like something ripe in a projectile sent by the tree to attempt sex. Attempt a continuation of sorts, multiply itself by itself and achieve progeny. Fruits are dropped by trees after filling them with seeds that will eventually take root in the soil. Fallen fruit is the extra friendship, the empty punch in the air. The plate of food after it has been refused repeatedly.

Friends live far away in cities. Only children's friends live nearby and go to the same school. Though where one lives has something to do with which school one goes to, the same is not true for work. I know very few people who refuse well-paying jobs because the workplace is too far away. Every one takes every job. And then the city becomes a city of commuters. Friends now are the people we work with and spend the whole day with. They have nothing to do with where we live. So friendship has hidden within it separation. The feeling that makes meeting a friend feel special has a lot to do with distance and separation. Often there is a temptation to move in with your friends, that is the end or at least the beginning of the end.

Because friends live far away the transportation system had to be created, the telecom networks had to be made.

Because of the nature of friendship we find it difficult to like the people who live near us, out neighbours. Neighbours are never counted as friends, they might have curiosity value like animals in a zoo. But that is about it.