Contradictions galore, one nation
Whenever we face an out-of-syllabus question, we tend to let our heart answer instead of our brain. Why? Quite simple. We don’t want to think deeply about anything as it tires us out. So, the file is pushed to our heart, who does what it’s trained for. For example, if you were asked to name 10 people you’d take along with you to Mars, chances are you’d immediately think of your loved ones first. But here’s the catch — they can’t help you survive in a hostile place like Mars. What are you going to do with/for them? A more practical response would be listing out those 10 individuals who can help the group survive. Goes without harping, Mars makes an imaginary excursion but it also shows how we often keep our brain from doing its job. Yes, one can counter-argue here, what’s the point in being so far away without our loved ones? But then, sentimentality keeps us humane but practicality keeps us alive.
India is a country of many contradictions and as long as we let these contradictions co-exist, we won’t go the path USSR and Yugoslavia chose last century. At the heart of our dichotomies lies our persistent cry for unity in diversity. Being diverse is a huge challenge in a world fast embracing monoculture and it’s necessary we understand the unique position we are in. The ongoing protests — which I believe are to protect our Constitution and reinforce our waning secularism — has demonstrated effectively how we are different and yet belong to the same soul. We can’t help but hear from the higher-ups that there is a natural singularity in us when it’s discernibly untrue. Contrary to what the elites would like us to believe, there isn’t one idea of India. A protest in a small city (with its long rallies) may not be as photogenic as a protest in Mumbai (with its witty placards) but they all appeal to various ideas of India and are equally significant. These moments of distinction in uniformity make us who we are as they determine where we are going to be in the future.
Social media has never been the ideal place for opinion-building. It’s the finest city for information but the worst village for knowledge. If you don’t include diverse dissenting voices, your timeline will bully you into forming misguided opinions, not very different in essence from those you diametrically opposed. Before you realize it, you’d be basically singing a tune bereft of nuance and apathy. The root of this analysis occurred a couple of years ago when the screen size of news minimized from your TV to your smartphone. Something else changed then: you accidentally turned smarter as you understood that scrolling is not only more convenient but also more powerful than zapping TV channels on your remote control. In our blind pursuit of narcissism and entertainment, we ended up changing the course of news. Back then, news happened elsewhere before reaching our timeline. Now, it’s the other way around.
Getting your first tattoo is a humongous decision. After that, none of your tattoo decisions mean much. The first one stands in the way of your relationship with your skin and once a needle dances in and out of your shaved patch, then there is no going back. Unless you are willing to go through the traumatic laser surgeries to make the accumulated ink leave your system via your poop. It doesn’t even matter how big or small your first tattoo is; could very well be three tiny dots on the back of your wrist but it’d still hold the highest position in your cabinet of body art-related decisions. I got my first tattoo a few months after getting into journalism in 2011: opening and ending quotation marks on the back of my palms to indicate everything is (was) under record. The ink parade ended four years later in 2014. However, my all-time favourite first tattoo belongs to a young woman who got a nice little butterfly on her forearm. It was supposed to indicate that she was finally free of her cocoon (read: familial authority) and thus independent in the true sense of words. Yet, a few weeks later, she couldn’t join the office trip as her dad didn’t grant her permission.
Speaking of change in perception, isn’t it tiring to know everything? Too much exposure and too little impact as a result. The reason is self-explanatory: we aren’t just supposed to know everything, we are expected to feel too, and that drains us out. Not anybody’s fault but accept it as an itchy lacunae in our wide array of evolution. Our grandfathers ahem-ed and our fathers duh-ed. We don’t have that luxury. Granted we sound foolish in our faux-idealism about how the world should be, our intentions are beyond reproach. The only problem is we unwittingly let ours decide for us; which includes non-human interventions like AI (who suggest us whom to follow on Instagram and what to order on Amazon) as well as human bodies. The latter prove to be more dangerous because the moment you let others build your thoughts for you, there is very little of you. You think that you think therefore you are.
Yours truly avoids social gatherings but is always in pursuit of ‘anthropological’ queries. As my latest social experiment, I randomly ask people how tall they are. Perhaps, either the people around me are plain ignorant or they really don’t care about the development of their body — pray tell me what can be more important to a person? — but 9 out of 10 don’t know how tall they are, neither in centimeters nor in feet. One girl who is barely 5 feet tall said she “must be 5’3” at least” and my immediate colleague guessed “around 5 feet 8” when I am taller than him and I am not fully 5’8” yet. The Uber driver who dropped me this wintry morning admitted “pata nahi, sir, hoga 5 feet ke aas pass” (must be around 5 feet) when he was already taller than me. Amazing, no?
In the current din of arguments against CAA/NRC, nobody from the mainstream media seems to focus on the persecuted minorities who have breached the international borders and are awaiting citizenship in India for years. The original law (Citizenship Act, 2003) hinted at providing them blanket entry on the merit of the suffering they’ve gone through in their home countries. However, as of now, they don’t feature anywhere in the discourse. How many voices belonging to persecuted Hindus/Sikhs/Buddhist/Jains/Parsis/Christians from Afghanistan/Bangladesh/Pakistan have you heard in the recent past? My guesstimate is close to zero.
In a similar vein, is anybody bothered about the economy anymore? Weren’t we at an abysmal scale just two weeks ago? Are we perfectly fine now? Or has the distraction tactics of our establishment worked wonderfully once again? Whatever the answers to these pertinent questions, let’s not forget that our economy is clearly in doldrums. Our growth rate is south of 5% while our unemployment rate is north of 6%. Also, is it safe to call it Hindu rate of growth? Or should we rebrand it as secular rate of growth?
Today’s blog post poses more questions and fewer answers. Sorry about that but my friend Visha is to be blamed here: she was the one who taught me to be faithful to question, not answers — the latter changes but the former doesn’t. And on that sweet note, what is meant by science fiction? Everything, from the most plausible ideas to the most absurd, science, in partnership with technology, pushes our world from fiction to non-fiction. Cure for cancer? Happening somewhere. Are robots for real? You bet. Drinking water from sewage? Say hello to Bill Gates. Flying cars in the future? They are already here. Fast-track to moon? Not very far. What is science fiction now won’t take long to transform towards reality and if that isn’t incredible, I don’t know what is.
