1984 by George Orwell – A book review

Imagine imprinted forcibly in your head a list of do’s and don’ts. And you can’t deviate and act otherwise because there’s patrolling happening. Even though the keeping a watch on is external, it feels like someone sitting in your head with a whip. You falter to comply and your back is torn open by the crack of the whip. Not just your actions, but your expressions and more importantly your thoughts are under surveillance. Your lips are pulled back a little longer than needed for a smile and instantly appears a rip on your skin – two banks created along a divide where droplets of blood appear like perspiration. You look tired when you’re not expected to or allowed to and immediately you’re jolted by a blow on your head; your countenance lacks the amount of hatred expected of it and right away you are taken to task. Follow sheep follow. Follow! Or suffer!

This is probably the scariest book I have ever read. George Orwell’s conceptualization of a place ruled by an oligarchy and headed by a person revered as Big Brother, where war means peace, freedom is slavery, and ignorance is strength depicts the unconquerable and incredible extent to which the human mind lusts for power – a power with an unfathomable distaste for thought. Thought, cognition, logic, emotion – basic elements that make humans human is not curtailed but annihilated; the slavery that is desired is more mental than physical, the latter being more easily achieved.

This book reminded me of a movie (though nothing of the plot is similar, but the suppression and oppression is) I had seen a long time ago, called ‘Hostel’ where a particular affluent group bids and pays huge amounts to an organization that captures random tourists in order for the group to enjoy inflicting pain in unimaginable torturous ways on them and see, experience and be amused by their suffering. It had seemed horrendous to me then until I read this book; at least in the movie, the captives were finally killed.

On further thought, why is 1984 so appalling, why was I so scared and shocked reading it? I just had to open my eyes and look around. It is still 1984 and it is yet the very Orwell’s world we are living in, in bits we understand and in bits we don’t, in what we are given to know and mostly from being kept in the dark. Isn’t war a means of feigning peace for most world leaders even today, a necessity to justify their presence, their power more than anything else, a necessity to keep the masses always wanting so they can’t rise beyond their basic needs and never rise to question the situations inflicted on them. Make the arrangement for the next meal more urgent and necessary than the missile strikes that can take away them, their limbs, their family; show them you are the saviours, the guardians.

If I don’t have my loaf of bread or a handful of rice, if I don’t have enough water to drink, I won’t think of and ask intelligent questions; I’ll not have thoughts beyond those. I’ll listen to you then; I’ll steal and kill if that is what you want me to do for that loaf of bread. I’ll sell myself for a cigarette. How can two and two not be five when you tell me so? I believe it; I believe you, I have told myself to because dying is not easy and living is even harder; not complying with you will take away the little I have, it won’t grant me death but an unendurable pain you’ll enjoy inflicting. Two and two ARE FIVE.

The rulers in Orwell’s story have departments called the thoughtpolice, who ensure that people don’t think beyond what has been regulated for them; they are constantly on the watch; they don’t just peep but also live in people’s houses as tele-screens; they watch their emotions, their words, their actions; they are there on the streets, they are there everywhere. You are never left to be alone. They have employed children to keep an eye on their parents, neighbours and society if it can be called that. The children are the most diligent soldiers; they see a purpose, they feel important, valued; their brains have been cleansed of innocence and fed hatred. How easy it is to manipulate the little malleable minds and as I look around, I see hatred being planted in these minds in the name of god and religion, boundaries and cultures. I can never forget the most horrific scene I have ever witnessed; it scared me to death – it was a documentary I think that I had been watching on television. Around 20 five-six year olds sitting around a table, all dressed in white (will stop with the description here), a book in front of each, they chanting aloud in unison, as if in a trance, nodding wildly as if possessed. It was not god but a devil I saw in each of them; devils being brought to life to be nurtured.

Orwell’s world also has institutions called the Ministry of Truth and the Ministry of Love. All in the present that Big Brother and his associates think wrong is erased from the present and past; the past is constantly altered. For example, let’s say the Taj Mahal isn’t felt necessary by the government and so it destroys it, and then the Ministry of Truth says it never existed; it erases its presence from all past books and references. A few years later, one would naturally believe it never existed because they don’t find it mentioned anywhere. What is red today might be needed to be called blue if the Ministry of Truth said so and it will always have been blue. A systematic erasing of history is carried out according to convenience – non-followers are quietly obliterated not just physically but from everything that they were associated with; after a point no-one would know they ever existed. History is altered and created afresh every day. Wonderful, isn’t it! More fabulous is the Ministry of Love. Gentleness oozing from its name, only if it were veritably so. But it isn’t. Its love lies in torturing the non-believers, the ones who have had the audacity to think, the ones to not comply – even if the non-compliance is only in their minds. It propagates hate and loves to do so.

Orwell’s country is incessantly at war – a necessity of the government. Whether it really is at war or not, we know not and the citizens never will, but they believe they are. And to wipe out an opposition – not the external one but if one does appear internally, within the government or the country, the level of conspiracy extends to creating their own make-belief opposition. The citizens are trained and expected to do both – rejoice in the formidability and justness of the institution in power and at the same time hurl insults and debase the opposition by terming them as traitors. Heads I win, tails I win. And you only win if you lose to me.

I wonder if oppressors in power in the past and present have picked up their thoughts and ideas of tyranny from this book. Even more dangerous I found was Orwell showing us how language and words can curtail thoughts. We’ve come a long way in terms of language and have created words to express every single thing, emotion – concrete and abstract and continue to do so, but imagine if these words were suddenly taken away from you. You want to express hunger but don’t have words, you feel delight but can’t express it as don’t have the words or can’t use them. Gradually, the emotions will be lost on you and you’ll ignore them to the point that you are convinced they never existed. Orwell’s rulers have reduced the words that can be used to a bare minimum, so expression becomes devoid of much emotion and thought is curtailed. You are free only as a slave.

To have thought of such an evil world in such detail and with such clarity, one can only do if some sadism exists in them and it is no surprise then that George Orwell’s wife in a biography describes her husband as a sadistic, homophobic and cruel person. It is also claimed that she had written parts of 1984 much earlier but was never given credit for it by Orwell. Anyway, I loved the book for how cleverly it was thought and written. Simply amazing! I think it’s a must read for everyone who thinks even remotely that governments manipulate citizens and their country; it will open your eyes to the extent to which governments go and can go; to the extent evil can exist in the hearts and minds of people. I think books like ‘1984’, ‘The stranger’ by Albert Camus and ‘Cats in the cradle’ by Kurt Vonnegut Jr. ought to be part of youngsters’ syllabus to help them be aware and think clearly and pragmatically when thrown in contrivances, and more importantly to form their own thoughts and not rely on borrowed ones in times of both war and peace.

Beware! Big Brother is watching.

My rating – 5/5

Picture credits

Cover page - http://friendslibrary.in/books/detailedinfo/910/1984

George Orwell - https://study.com/academy/lesson/george-orwell-biography-books-facts.html