And don’t you talk to me of the surveillance camera!

There’s surveillance, and then, there is surveillance. The robot monkeys of the management watch over
the opiate workers, the misty-eyed proles watch over the lusty cappies. The teacher gazes at the TV, and
the TV also keeps its gaze fixed on the teacher. In principle, they say, whoever watches you can also be
watched, and whoever sends signals, can also receive them. And from within the infinite commentaries
on the question of surveillance at once obscure and forever fastened to wishful thoughts, the question
of surveillance spins forever in its completed circle. But remember dear, principles and wishes don’t
often hold in this world, except in the minds of the arrogant, the faithful, and the bloody stoopid.

Only the arrogant wish for surveillance cameras to have an accurate glimpse of our minds, and there’s
no denying that. “We’ll have cameras installed at any cost,” that’s what exactly they say. Cameras to
extend the gaze of power over the university, in the same way power wishes to watch over factories,
agricultural lands, schools, and prisons. Make no mistake: this is the arrogance of a desire for greater
power, the arrogance of all-too-familiar power to inspect the acts and thoughts of other human beings.
Call that conceit or egotism, or simply arrogance. Arrogance as part of their very daily take or hold on
campus life-as an instinct of power, not just a symbolic question of scientific or academic competence,
or campus “discipline”. Their Foucaults reside in conference papers on surveillance, punishments, and
panopticons, their Marxes and Gramscis in the intelligent expositions on hegemony that their wannabes
regurgitate word-by-word in their semester answer-scripts. Arrogant, for they prioritise surveillance
cameras over books, better library facilities for students, researchers, and teachers, or for that matter,
the pursuit of what was once held as “knowledge”. Arrogant again, for they decide what is important,
and then call you in, “always for reasonable dialogue.” And they condemn you for their condemnable
acts. Someone has said that it requires less mental effort to condemn than to think. If the assault on one
student two years back calls for surveillance cameras now, surely we can have scuba divers and a
Baywatch squad to patrol the university ponds where quite a number of people have drowned in the
last few years? Or a lesser number of air-conditioners for the untrodden rooms of the university admins,
and a slighty better number of airy classrooms for students? Better food in the hostels? Better
interaction? Kind, better, and humane thoughts?

The faithful call for a kind of obligatory and symbolic opposition to arrogance. Deputations, sit-ins, and
gheraoes repeat year after year, endless and mouthy repetition of solemn slogans pant infinitely as
empty words keeping tracking on a circular loop. There you see the spectacle of opposition, rather than
the opposition of the spectacle. The “movement” dies when the authorities break the cordon, or call in
their security, and the police. Or when the f**king media decide once again that the sleaze show of an
illiterate actress gets more viewer attention than the ritual protests of the faithful. Then, there appears
violence. Violence of the arrogant, and rarely, violence of the faithful on which the powers of arrogance
further feed on. The discussions on violence become a giant discourse on circumstances, and what
might have happened if the “movement” did or did not take off in all the best and worst directions. And
some occasional fish do learn about water by bumping into the rotting corpse of the “movement”, only
to forget.

The bloody stoopid refuse to take that all in. Theirs is a belief of transition similar to any relational
system of thought, sensitive to the distant harmonics of those in power. Like travellers pushing beastily
on a trainway door, unmindful of the person standing next spitting on the railway platform or on the
next person standing, trampling and scratching, they think only of the train to catch. Anything spouted
over the public address system holds their attention so long as it relates to the journey they are making.
Any question whispered, any emotion expressed from the side is pointless. They might be really late for
the next corporate or teaching job, the next MBA degree, the next scholarship or conference abroad.
Thoughts relating to the university are a temporary transit affair, and therefore inconsequential. Bloody
stoopid minds don’t find it congenial to ask questions, or to pay off the debts they owe to the freedom
of the campus, for they never did learn to think freely, ever.

Well, it’s about time we spoke of “freedom”. Time to reflect seriously and collectively on this subject
which might, and then might not, necessitate in its turn a reconsideration of definitions. Time to know
freedom, and to stop being them -the arrogant, the faithful, and the bloody stoopid- and that none of
them cares to leap over the horizons set by their own narrow principles and wishes. Place the word
“freedom” in film, and sometimes you’ll have a nice Holywood movie where Mel Gibson groans off his
famous last word on screen. But then, the word becomes too narrow and limited, for we’re not talking
in terms of geographical boundaries alone.

Freedom is not the translation of idealities. It never was, even if there are no visible displays of
arrogance. This means that you cannot have it in a place that is inert, neutral, insensitive and
homogenised to the extent that it resembles someone’s terribly utopic vision: a powerpoint show of a
dropping apple, an obedient student. Even if the utopic vision consists of a dystopia- a brilliant
“academic atmosphere” existing in a university of sprawling and obscene concrete structures with
potted and planted artificial green where you cannot walk about in the evening without pressing
sufficient proof of your identities. Where you can’t talk politics or love or bodies except in presentation
seminars and term papers. Where you’re robots to the extent that you are not allowed to argue and
debate sedition and sex, except before the probing eyes of the voyeur on camera. Where you cannot
smoke, sip, caress, fondle, think of love, or simply roll in the grass without being the obedient and
performative machines that power expects you to be: visible and accountible for the “crimes” you didn’t
yet commit.

Freedom is different. It’s the recognition of differences in the real, and even important differences; it’s
also a commitment to the preservation of the others’ rights to remain different and free without being
broken into submission. While arrogance howls of moral offenses, freedom hints at the possibilities of
mature choice. While faith defines boundaries for you, and stoopidity makes you unaware of any world
outside thought's thoughts about itself, freedom helps you transcend boundaries. And once recognised,
freedom carries with itself a force of its own. For it finds that life is more synonymous with what are
usually understood as divergences from the norm; these divergences are really-existing conditions for
life being life rather than mindless docility which is a mimicry of life, and it leads nowhere. As Rosa
someone famously said it: “Freedom is always the freedom of dissenters.”

It doesn’t take a Nostradamus to foresee that in time, this contemplative utopia, if utopic it be, will
gather dust in the real. And this evil eye of Sauron will serve as another failed model with which the
university authorities had hoped to monitor the bodies and the thoughts of the university community.
Even if nobody throws bricks at these surveillance cameras, rest assured that everyone in campus will
flout 'em and scout 'em, and scout 'em and flout 'em for now. And when the authorities will again have
their routine bouts of entropic visions, perhaps there will be someone to decently tell them that there
are more immediate and serious academic tasks at hand than to play “Peek-a-boo, I see you” inside the
campus. It will be someone among the young students for sure. The rest have grown too old.