Stop the world, I want to get off!

Let us face it, the world today is an agglomeration of events and impressions, most of which are “full of sound and fury, signifying nothing.” The word “most” is deliberate there, because interspersed in these inconsequentially gauche episodes are pixels of quintessential significance. Those who walk through with a perfunctory glance will miss them, but the pragmatic observer pales at their intrinsic importance.
Another year of nebulous delights has sped by. It was the purveyor of both the mundane and the magnificent. The senseless killing of hundreds of innocents went unnoticed in Iraq, in Chad, in Kenya, in Afghanistan. Superpowers gloating over obscenely fat (and mainly undeserved) pay cheques, turned a deaf ear to the pleas of the poor, the dispossessed, the starving, the dying.
While ineffectual statesmen, deified by the press, made exponential speeches in totally ersatz parables, cities burnt, and hopes crumbled. The statesmen rode back in the plush comfort of stretch limos, while the common man shook his head in untenable despair.Indiscriminate greed
It took a brave person like Gore to stand up to the established lobbies in the hallowed precincts of power. Every second some gigantic tree that took ages to reach its splendid proportions is felled. Indiscriminate greed and implausible superstitions propel the slaughter of animals to slake the demand for parts believed to rejuvenate vitality.
The blood of cobras is collected to be served to men with pouches of indulgence hanging from their jowls; sharks are caught, their fins cut off, and then tossed mercilessly back into the waters. The majestic whale is hunted and killed, so are the bear, and the rhino. The senseless killing of wildlife is equalled only by the facetious attitude towards the destruction of the environment. We are the ingenuous inheritors of this presumptuous folly.
Similar shenanigans are not missing from the other facets of life. Religion, politics and even the sacred corridors of learning are rife with corrupt practices and insensitive machinations. Impoverished citizens hide in the hills of Orissa, fearing persecution. Mosques are burnt, temples desecrated, churches destroyed, synagogues defiled. Hatred and intolerance are nurtured by lack of communication. It is ignorance that breeds insensitivity.
Caught between two worlds — “one dead, and the other powerless to be born” — is the common man. To him goes the questionable delights of this unctuous struggle. He trusts in political statements shrouded in arcane promises, but tastes the bitterness too late. His dream of democracy is cloaked in terse sobriety. He no longer recognises democracy in the travesty of the ideology that he sees around him. The mantle is borne by worthless men who have no calling, except that of unrestrained avarice.
Imprisoned in the milieu of unbridled progress is also the optimist. He counters the argument of enervating pessimism by pointing out the achievements of a Muhammad Yunus, a Jimmy Carter, an Orhan Pamuk, a Doris Lessing, a Roger Kornberg. We are mulling ideas in an age of tremendous possibilities, and it is up to us to bear with grace and dignity the responsibilities of a “brave new world.”
We need to wake up to the loss of tremulous hopes before we are engulfed by the rampage of festinate greed. Do I want to get off now? This is the only world I know, and I believe that we are capable of rising above all these to a level of refined purity. So, let me just wait and see what’s around the bend.

courtesy: CHOTY-ANNE THOMAS (Open Page)