Deadly virus and deadlier racism
Over 80 million cars were sold globally last year; that’s about 220,000 in a day. It’s insane if you do the math. On one hand, we are supposed to be fighting climate change — because adopting is out of question — while on the other, we are least bothered about the rising number of automobiles on the road. Every car, by design, is an equivalent of Uncle Scrooge’s bed: a car seldom remains fully occupied. In comparison, a motorcycle takes little road space and produces less carbon footprint. The downside being, there are greater chances of you getting killed on a motorbike than inside a car. Auto enthusiasts will enthuse that the days of fossil fuels are over and we will eventually move to cleaner options (read: electric cars). Yet, that doesn’t solve the space problem. Interestingly, Elon Musk’s Mars-ridden brain doesn’t seem to quantify this pain point. The number of cars will continue to increase, traffic would bulge and flexing roads won’t help either (google Braess’ Paradox to know why). By a strong measure, the long-term solution is to invest and upgrade public transport. The carbon mess we find ourselves in today wouldn’t have been possible had we stuck to steam cars, no? But then, contentment doesn’t apply to our species. We had to go ahead and drown in crude oil — there will be blood indeed — with Saudi Arabic hitting the lottery in 1938 and Mr. Getty doing the rest.
After years of staying away from a steering wheel, I finally relented last week and joined driving classes. In one word, I’d describe the overall experience so far as fun. However, in detail, I’d admit it’s terrifying. The very thought of not being able to control a 1000-kg beast and crashing it into a wall, or worse, people, benumbs me. On top of it, being a hyper person who is impatient by nature and wants to get things done as hurriedly as possible, the concept of applying the accelerator or brake softly seems foreign to me. For a driver, there is so much going on: focus ahead, focus on the rear-view mirrors, focus on the left, focus on the right, focus on the sky because another vehicle might just topple over the flyover (this is India, remember?). Enveloped by this stress, how am I supposed to enjoy music in the car à la Tom Cruise in Jerry Maguire (1996)? In the past one week, I’ve spent so much time peering at people stuck inside their cars at signal, admiring them for being able to push clutch and change gears so effortlessly. Sorry for the exaggerations but I totally gave up on motorcycles in 2008–09 just because I had a minor accident. Once — if at all — I learn to drive a car properly without harming others, I will go back to my mission of taking people’s breath away without having to kill them.
It’s 2020 and the word ‘influencer’ still exists on social media. At the risk of sounding vulgar, this term is hollower than our Preamble. The so-called influencers gain money and that’s it. The actual influencers work off the radar and gain influence; they aren’t interested in money. These are generally your relatives and their relatives. They make you (and your parents) do things that defy logic and gumption in the name of keeping up one’s name. Even individualism works on a discount in our country. Anyway, going back to online influencers, these folks are in the number game and nothing else. They aren’t there to enrich others’ lives, they are there to enrich themselves. Having said that, it’s necessary to acknowledge the role we have played in letting some self-appointed influencers influence the rest of the crowd.
Sorry to rant but I am yet to come across an interesting travel story from any of my friends/colleagues who visited Europe. It’s almost like they are immune to stories. Can’t blame them though. They go like a tourist and return like a tourist, with little to no interest in learning a bit about the history, language and culture of the places they are visiting. Imagine a blank page floating around pretending to be an airplane. Or maybe I am not a good extractor of stories because my circle is tight and tiny. Unfortunately, the most interesting piece of story happened to involve the breaking of a dear friend’s arm in Acropolis. Greece is his least favoured country nowadays. Fair enough.
Speaking of Europe, have you ever been to Budapest? But before you answer, let’s flashback a bit. Being humans who are born with creative instincts, we paint pictures all the time. Even when we don’t think, we are. Our mind is a workshop that doesn’t give a fuck whether it’s run by God or Devil. Scenarios after scenarios, images after images, tales after tales, our head is constantly bursting with unchecked thoughts. As if consciousness wasn’t tiring enough, our mind is continuously painting even when we are fast asleep: we dream of people we’ve never met, and possibly will never meet, and tell them stuff straight out of a Victorian novel. When you wake up, you acknowledge nothing is real but for those brief moments, the sunlight falling on your face didn’t give you migraine and you felt the warmth of somebody’s company. This is precisely what Budapest feels like to me. A place I’ve never been to and most probably, will never visit in my lifetime but there is a familiarity and an unscripted ease. Blame it on George Erza’s song, Wes Anderson’s The Grand Budapest Hotel (2014) and glossy articles in Lonely Planet and Conde Nast.
Weird as it is, power doesn’t flow smoothly but pettiness does. Moreover, there is a thin line between being powerful and being petty. From the top, the view can distort and even the sanest of folks might resort to lousy decisions. You don’t have to go through the thick pages of history to see a pattern there. In my boyhood, I was fascinated by the moral lessons provided by Akbar-Birbal in comic books (mainly Tinkle). It was much later that I learned that those episodes were heavily influenced by Tenali Ramakrishnan. Birbal was more of a folk myth with little writing to support his intellect whereas emperor Krishnadevaraya’s court had ample evidence for their smart boy. Interestingly, both Birbal and Tenali existed in the same century although the latter left the stage long before the former entered the scene. Anyway, the point I am making here is in both the versions — whichever is truer to history — the emperor in question, be it Akbar or Krishnadevaraya, exhibit extreme traits of pettiness. And it takes a wise soul in the court to help these powerful men see reason and lay better decisions.
Unless you live in Greenland, you aren’t safe from coronavirus. At least this is what you’ll conclude from the amount of fearmongering prevalent in mainstream media. Before you could blink your eyes, strange conjectures are presented by presumably racist mediapersons. Perhaps their desire to be the first to report something gets in the way of their desire to be the first to report something accurately. Whether a virus emerged from dead bats or dead fish shouldn’t matter as the search for a cure intensifies, but the agenda is clear: degrade Chinese civilization for their way of life. Not very long ago, we went through a similar drill with Ebola when people from northern Africa faced racist brunt. Later, Zika virus showed up in Brazil and once again, we noted how skewed journalism is towards people with colonial past. Microorganisms aren’t our greatest problem. Lack of perspective is.
Being a wannabe shayar (poet), I dawdle couplets in Hindustani. In most of these lines, I refer to myself as gareeb (poor). Although I fall in the 3% population bracket that pays income tax and in 10% bracket that earns more than ₹15,000 a month, I have no qualms whatsoever in referring to myself as a poor person in my poetry. Why? Because metaphors, like black lives, matter. When I say something to the effect of gareebi aur maatam, dono hi chhaye huye hain — squalid and lamentation are widespread nowadays — gareebi (poverty) is less about being and more about mindset. Similarly, aadmi kabhi utna gareeb nahi ho sakta jitni uski soch ho sakti hai (a person can’t be as poor as his thoughts.) This misappropriation of ‘gareeb’ is fine with me because I’ve done my homework, and see no nobleness in disbandment of words overnight. Also, for somebody who isn’t OK with Hindi imposition in the south, I do execute a lot in Devanagari.
My favourite actors are those who cry for Mother Earth but won’t make the minutest of adjustments to their current lifestyles, be it code of diet or mode of transport. My favourite politicians are those who have long-term memory during elections before switching back to short-term memory during their reign. My favourite activists are those who are not as interested in waving their flag as in making the wind blow in their direction. My favourite writers are those who worry about the cover of their books rather than the content in their pages. My favourite analysts are those who turn a blind eye to bare facts because it doesn’t fit in well with their career path. My favourite sportspersons are those who rise to indescribable challenges on the field but crawl without a fight in front of the establishment. My favourite parents are those who have convinced their children that the world can’t wait to be conquered by them. My favourite Brahmins are those who live in the USA and believe caste system is more dead than Sanskrit. My favourite Dalits are those who led privileged lives but realized soon enough that co-opting something that never affected them in the first place makes their pain somehow relevant. My favourite friends are those who get in touch with you for a favour and go back to being a stranger. My favourite artists are those who revel in their fakeness without admitting that their hypocrisy propels the estrangement of art. My favourite readers are those who completed this paragraph and took a deep breath right after this full stop.
Once upon a decade, we were expected to count our blessings. I don’t know what happened but here we find ourselves counting our followers, connections, comments, recommendations, likes and whatnot. As mentioned above, the number game is stronger than ever before. Being illiterate is OK as long as you aren’t innumerate; a paradox that explains the unprecedented success of TikTok. Anything sells and everything has a value. If you don’t decide your price, somebody else will. At the core lies our need to consume/produce content. At first, the setup appears quite democratic but as a content-creator, it’s the last thing you’d want. I am least comfortable giving that kind of power to the consumers of my content. They can like or dislike whatever that’s presented to them but they shouldn’t get to decide what is good or what is bad. They only get to decide what is relatable and what isn’t. And that is the reason I focus on my words and not the impact/reach they have. Simply not my problem to deal with.
