Trapped Inside Baudrillard Simulacra.

MuhAMMAD ALI 'Blue pill or the red pill?' - 'You take the blue pill, the story ends... You wake up in your bed and believe whatever you want to believe... You take the red pill; you stay in the Wonderland. And I show you how deep the rabbit hole goes,' Morpheus asks Neo in Wachowski's blockbuster movie 'The Matrix' released in 1999. Do these famous lines from Wachowski's blockbuster movie 'The Matrix' released in 1999 ring a bell in our minds? Was Matrix just a sci-fi movie or much more than that? What was the actual plot of the movie? (I bet majority of us are still struggling to find out the real answer).

Was there any connection between the basic story line of the movie and Jean Baudrillard theory of 'Simulacra and Simulation.' What thousands of years old Plato's 'Allegory of Cave' has to do with the movie and the concept of Simulacra? The answers to these intriguing and mind-blowing questions are probably as complex as the movie itself.

However, let's try and make an endeavour to answer some of these questions. Let's start with the more complex concepts, Baudrillard's 'Simulacra and Simulation.' Perhaps the famous French philosopher and cultural theorist Jean Baudrillard got inspiration from Plato's 'Allegory of Cave' which became the basis of his famous book 'Simulacra and Simulation' published in 1981. Whatever he prophesized, decades ago, is appearing to be true in present times. However, majority of us misunderstood him when he proposed such ideas. Alongside JeanFrancois Lyotard's, Baudrillard too was convinced that we live in hyperreality.

But he went a step ahead in proposing his philosophy. What is Hyperreality after all? Baudrillard sees it in a different perspective. According to him we live in a Simulacrum; meaning a virtual arena where the reality has been replaced by simulations, representations, images and more precisely false images. The environment is so fluid that we cannot distinguish between the real and the unreal. He took the world by storm when he made the most controversial statement (for some), 'The Gulf war did not take place,' meaning that the reality of the war was presented to the world as (mis) represented of re-represented by the media. The images and media environment looked more real and influencing than the real. Again, majority of us misunderstood what he actually meant.

Baudrillard was of the view that in contemporary times the hyperreality is so intoxicating, captivating and mesmerizing that we want to...