Hello friend.
“Hello friend”? That sounds lame. Is it the misfit “Hello” for an
online journal? Or the second word, the simplest yet most commonly misunderstood
relationship of our times? Besides the fact that it is a bow-to-the-protagonist-of-a-show-that-recently-became-my-2nd-favourite-of-all-time
disguised as a lousy conversation starter, it doesn’t matter. What matters is
the fact that this is essentially a new year’s post coming 100 days late.
The quintessential epiphany had happened
at that near inescapable moment, when the creature of habit in you makes an
inadvertent mistake while writing the date for the very first time after that much
awaited and widely celebrated stroke of midnight. This time when I repeated the
customary error though, I couldn’t merely scribble over the last digit of the
year. Scribbling over the tens digit as well, I consciously accepted the
fact that it was also the end of a decade. Given the unrelenting grasp of time
on existence, this occasion with its profundity and human propensity for the
theatrical - retrospection was inevitable.
This is me recounting that moment
100 days later during a nationwide lockdown amidst a highly contagious global
pandemic that has already infected more than 1.3 million people across 170
countries, claiming over 70,000 lives.
What makes me recount that
insignificant moment was the insignificant realisation that with transmission
to patient zero traced back to November 2019, the scourge that has gripped
humanity now seems as if nature had suddenly decided to pull up the last act of
the past decade. In an unexpected anti-climax enacted at the very dusk of 2019,
amidst countless overlapping food webs spanning ecosystems, nature
had somehow devised an insidious yet ingenious method of doing perhaps the only
thing it ever does - restore balance.
Quite ironically, this was done
by pitting the smallest conceivable organism, something that would find a place
at the very bottom of the evolutionary tree (something whose existence begs
reconsideration of the very concept of existence) against the species that
resides at the very top, in an evil reproduction of the classic David vs
Goliath. OR it is just the Chinese coming up with their own brand of bio-economic
colonialism because oil is just so 20th century now. Either way, one
couldn’t have imagined a better act of restoration of balance even if this was
a Black Mirror episode with a dark twist.
As a result, perhaps for the only
time in eternity, ALL of humanity has been simultaneously pushed to mental and
emotional resonance in a battle against one common enemy, a diabolical by
product of our own indiscretions. The only mercy is the fact that humans are
the only organisms in nature capable of identifying, uniting and repelling an
existential threat. To be fair, it is more than enough of an unfair advantage.
Even after this devastating ‘check’, the universe has ensured that the game
will go on. Or has it?
Intelligent consciousness is the unaccountable variable. With 7.5 billion (and counting) members of a
technological civilisation equipped with the ability to communicate at almost any
scale and speed, imagine 7.5 billion choices being made every moment of every
day of every year of existence. Judging by empirical evidence one unwittingly comes
across on various media platforms these days, a sizeable proportion of those
choices cannot be deemed intelligent by any stretch of imagination. This is not
only an unsettling realisation of our mortality, but also of the subtle truth
that far from priding ourselves in being the ultimate product of creation arrogant
enough to ‘save the earth’, with all
our arts and sciences developed and honed over millennia, humans still amount
to one random variable in the enormous equation of existence – one that can be
removed any time in a more dramatic and audacious act of restoration of
balance.
What this mischievously well
timed, seemingly seminal act of the universe has also done is pushed the pause
button to a massive machinery that was never designed for a maintenance halt. With our profit
margins and working capital and credit cards and bad loans, we have literally
mortgaged our present to the future, through each other. But when this machine
starts grinding towards a halt and the user manual has nothing to say, those with
power finally realise that they have screwed up yet again. With all our
politics, religion, morality and technology, intellectual social animals are
forced to isolate themselves for days on end, because their survival depends on
defeating an invisible enemy that can make them turn against each other in a
merciless act of self-destruction, both knowingly and otherwise.
Those dwelling at the fringes, the
ones who are forced to count on the ball to keep rolling, remain at the mercy
of the system itself- tragic victims of economics, the spare change of capitalism.
The remaining lot - the docile, the ever obedient, the
middle children of history, ones holding on with the slightest control,
those privileged enough to be able to write about it on a high speed internet connection amidst a nationwide lockdown in
essentially-a-new-year’s-post-which-was-100-days-late
- can only wait for those in power to
shepherd
the weak through the valley of darkness.
Noticeably, in our desperate pause, somewhere between the maddening cacophony of all the surplus noise and despair, in these lonely moments of inevitable retrospection, we
have managed to give ourselves enough time to realise the depth of shit we have
driven ourselves into. Perhaps unlike any of our powerful ancestors, we are
the only civilisation fortunate enough to get such a polite collective reminder at
the pinnacle of its
decadence.
Let's hope we remember.
"I've seen enough people who die for
an idea. I don't believe in heroism; I know it's easy and I've learnt it can be
murderous. There's no question of heroism in all this. That's an idea which may
make some people smile, but the only means of fighting a plague is — common
decency."
Albert
Camus (The Plague)
Goodbye, friend.
