With the rise of the Cockroach Janta Party (CJP), a satirical social media handle that turned into a movement, a certain unmissable protest is being registered: a protest against the way the bureaucratic and political elites view ordinary, jobless citizens. The mock party in question appears to be an outcry against a condescending attitude as the elite view them as cockroaches — vulgar, scornful and ugly creatures cropping up everywhere.

Theatre of the Absurd, a well-known theatre movement, which emerged after the Second World War, offers some insights. In Eugene Ionesco’s play, Rhinoceros, everyone turns into a Rhinoceros except a drunkard and social misfit: Berenger. Though initially tempted by the possibility of turning into one especially after the transformation of his best friend, Jean, a conformist, Berenger resists this transformation and remains to be the last living human representative. In a world where everyone is swept away by powerful and violent ideologies, Berenger remains who he is, warts and all, a human being. Ionesco’s play is often seen as one man’s resistance of fascist ideologies inculcated and normalised in stunning speed and scale.

In another work, Franz Kafka’s Metamorphosis, a travelling salesman, Gregor Samsa, turns into a bug in his bed with the mind of a salesman intact. The world around the four walls of his room remains unchanged and that is exactly the reason for his struggles. Cockroaches or Rhinos are what they are: uncommon, viewed as ugly and treated with scorn. Nevertheless, if all we are asked to do is to turn into them, that may very well be the gravest of threats that we would ever face. This could mean one should become what appears to be ‘logical’ for the crowd even at the cost of shedding a life one lived from birth till the moment the transformation is enforced.

While in Rhinoceros, if it is a protest against massified ideologies by one man who refuses to conform, in Metamorphosis, the protest is against a long-held ideology that offers no space for being different. In the former, everyone except one person transforms into a Rhinoceros, in the latter, one person turns into a bug and everyone else remains to be who they were. Both texts, the former a play and the latter a novelette, approach the same problem from two very different settings. In the first, a pandemic of ‘Rhinoceritis’ is spreading and in the second, a Kafkaesque lonely battle is waged against brutal normalcy. The birth of the CJP as a parody of contemporary politics reflects both the themes in varying proportions. The CJP moment and........

© The News Minute