Psychology of a Dictator.

Disclaimer: This is outright shitty, boring and disgraceful. Proceed at your own risk.

This is a piece I wrote for a creative writing event for my hostel. Its rather shitty, but take a look.

There we were in a dimly lit room, straight out of a dark comedy meets drama style setting from Hollywood. Opposite me, sitting on a worn out sofa is a man past four score and seven years. His presence would not command the respect of a gully dog, but his reputation precedes him. As the aging lion who still roars proceeds to exercise his vocal chords, yours truly, the scribe for the occasion begins to scratch his notepad with a stub of a pencil.

“My name is K and I am a dictator. I don’t have a sad excuse for a moustache on my face. I don’t command a huge army in any part of the world and I don’t have dollars cheated out of subjects stashed in myriad banks. I don’t mind the newspapers spewing damaging stuff about me from time to time.

My name is K and I am, still, a dictator…..

Those were the days when you could rule with an iron fist in a velvet glove and get away with it, even when the glove was absent. Not that it was much to get away with in the first place. But the feeling of not having to answer to anyone in the neighbourhood was surely an exhilarating feeling.

I mean look at the guys (and gals) today. One guy can’t get his garden cultivated according to his likes and dislikes because his head gardener wanted roses of a different colour. The way I see it, if your head gardener does not like your choice of colours, you take a battle axe and divide him into four head gardeners and no questions asked.

I’ll tell you one thing and put it down in your diary if you have one. You know how I began? As a youth of twenty, I started running Riot in The City. That was a good 60 odd years ago. In case you don’t know, Riot was a night club, frequented by the who’s who of the political class of the age. There I learned that winny-wannies who called themselves leaders were just a bunch of pushovers. And push them over I did. It was there that I learned to accept Chaos as better than Order and I grew to love the proposition, especially when I propogated the chaos.

You know what is wrong with the world today? I’ll tell you man. Its just that people have fallen into a rut, of endless mechanical life where they accept the Order as a part of the scheme of things, aiming for a static perfection that is never to be. As Barney said, ‘What’s the first syllable in routine?

My name is K and I am a dictator.

You know why I am still the main guy here? Not because the people love me. Its because nobody cares. The way I see it, you leave the people alone, and they leave you alone. I mind my own business and don’t keep up a face. The people mind their own business and have probably forgotten that I exist. I still get all I want, I live like the king I am. And nobody gives a shit.

My name is K and I am a dictator.

Of course, there is a reason why I am a dictator. Apart from being the occasional creator of chaos in chief, I have my own secret recipe to keep the power all to myself. I host lavish dinners from time to time and I waste no opportunity to show them who the boss is. While dining with the others, I allow the conversation to linger on general topics, but after a couple of hours I inevitably begin one of my many monologues. These speeches are flawless from start to finish because I rehearse them any time I get a moment. My favorite topics include: ‘When I was a soldier’, ‘When I was in The City’, ‘When I was in prison’ and "When I was the leader in the early days of the party’. You can’t say that I am not putting in an effort. Its no child’s play, being a dictator. It comes with practice.

I don’t generally try to construct any sort of image in front of my subjects, but from time to time I let a few of my staff see me in certain modes, who then rapidly spread the word. And let me tell you, they are not clichés, they are classics. A cliché is a cliché for a reason. I pace frequently inside rooms, always to the same tune that I whistle to myself and always diagonally across the room, from corner to corner. My handwriting is impeccable. When the famous psychologist Carl Jung saw my handwriting, he remarked: ‘Behind this handwriting I recognize the typical characteristics of a man with essentially feminine instinct’.

My name is K and I am a dictator.

It is little wonder that I am still a dictator. I am a dedicated student of the art and I strive for excellence. I got to secretly try and suppress a few hot-blooded youth from The City. A good dictator never allows for a repeat of history. That shall be all.”