Now when you think you’ve seen it all in this circus of a city, something else comes up. Setting aside the full catalogue of the farcical state of the nation and the utter bleakness of our current direction, one incident shed an all too pressing light on one of the central traits that have reduced our collective psyche to this abysmal condition. It’s the mesmerizing knack for shamelessness that has come to plague our waking hours. It’s everywhere, from hopeless streets to parody politics. Guess the Buddha had a point when he said that inner shame and fear of wrongdoing, together, form the essential foundation for society. What we lack in the former, we have more than over-compensated for in the latter, and in the wrong way. The recent tragedy of atheist and gay hunts and the banning of two films for ‘historical and religious inaccuracies’ were simply a chilling reminder of how much dissonance, paranoia and willful ignorance there is. I received a personal gift along the same vein the other day, and I’ll name names. A birthday dinner at the seriously kitsch and overrated The Tap in Maadi,…
