Leave ’em alone!
Imagine being stranded in the ocean. A soggy raft underneath your back with the sky in front of you appearing closer than it should. Everything feels wet. All your fears have drowned by now. You don’t care about the sharks or the whales anymore. Their thoughts fail to scare; their presence might even interest you. Forget them, not a tiny creature has bothered to greet you in a long, long while. It’s a miracle you are still breathing. But then, you aren’t you. You are at peace. You are finally free. No more societal obligations to deal with. You always wanted to break through except you didn’t have waves—some of them unforgivably violent — in your mind back then. You slept all night uninterrupted by dreams, nightmares or earthly commotions. By the look of the sun now, it must be close to 11 am in the civilized world. There’s nothing to do for you though. No plans. Incredibly enough, despite feeling rested, you want to slide back to sleep: motionless, aimless and eventually lifeless. You can almost hear your body eating itself away. And yet you don’t feel any discomfort. Your longing for the ultimate solitude came at a heavy price.
Wait, what’s that noise?
It’s a huge ship moving closer to you. You can see it from the corner of your eyes. Dammit, who gave them the permission to photobomb your final moments? Turns out bullies follow no rule be it on land or otherwise. Before you could realize it, they are dropping in a tiny floating boat and two men are already moving in your direction. They have motor advantage. Your raft doesn’t even have a paddle.
You stay on your back wondering what can happen now.
What would you do?
Odds are in their favour. They will save you whether you like or not. They will drag your scrawny ass back to the cage you escaped from. However, in your final fight, you will try to fend off as much as possible. Even to the point they will almost give up on you — which would be awkward — as giving up on you would be equivalent to taking you closer to an assured death. You might even jump off your wooden abode to prove a point.
The irony is strong with this one.
I thought of this scenario today while reading more and more about that American missionary who wanted to proselytize the Sentinelese tribe in Andaman. His bloody demise would have made sense if this year was 1532 but unfortunately, we are in 2018. There is more than enough information available online about why uncontrolled contact with a protected tribe is dangerous for the latter party; their immune system is susceptible to the slightest of change in their environ. Owing to such drastic circumstances, the least one can do for isolated human beings is leave them the fuck alone. They have survived for millennia on their own. No matter how brutal their way of life could be, they have done far less damage to our planet. In other words, they will be fine. In two words, fuck off.
Yet, there are idiots who love to think of themselves as saviours (or agents of saviour) and want to impose their half-baked religious halo (or whole-baked scientific debauchery) on some ungarmented tribe. So, for what? To gain brownie points with the powers-to-be who have patented God? Even if the intentions aren’t godly, the principles of disruption remain the same. It’s basically a way of saying “your way sucks, accept my way” in as few words as there can be. History is ripe with countless account of oppression stemming from superiority complex of the founders.
Lastly, this is not about them. This is about us. We can’t save others when we ourselves are in a bottomless sinkhole. Precisely why I’ve arrived at this conclusion: Wherever we are and whatever we aim to do with our time left in our restless hearts, we deeply understand our loneliness. No amount of company can dilute this truth. No crowd is bigger than our solitude. The only difference lies in our day-to-day execution: some seek themselves, others seek others. And the moment we find what we were looking for, we either drift away with it or we let it devour us.
