Decade Ends

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-2^nd-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 20^th 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.