Just keep up the pretence, it's easier

Rabbi Shergill

MSK, my organic farmer friend from Gurdaspur, is subdued in his latest vlog: ‘Big thanks to Baba Beas for blessing our home with his touch, to those who called and those who didn’t, it’s not him encroaching on our space, but us on his. Today I won’t say it’s all man’s fault, that’s “overused” and “over-discussed”, that talk’s now “ordinary”, we’ll have to talk about it in some other “substantial” way... rest later.’ (sic)

He signs off. His eyes twinkling with grief and resignation, in a way that only a Punjabi’s can. ‘Ordinary’, the word’s a dying fish. It first flops about on the screen, then inside my head. Spraying out newer dimensions of grief and questions with each thud: ‘What do you do when the extraordinary becomes ordinary? When grief becomes universal? When guilt becomes unbearable? When data becomes drivel? When fools lead and the wise go along? When my sins have no redemption?’

The answers are everywhere. You preen on Insta, cuss on FB, hook up on Tinder, queue up for IELTS, line up for elections, dream of emigration, binge on Netflix, knock back some pills… Denial, mass psychosis, hysteria, depression, irrational hope… Anything except face up to ourselves and the truth that this way don’t work. But the implication — re-evaluating everything is just so huge, so reality-rearranging, so daunting emotionally, intellectually and spiritually that we find it easier to just keep up the pretence.

So, the five-year governments go on selling us eternal progress, the corporation eternal profits, universities eternal employment, oil eternal energy, democracy eternal freedom, religion eternal salvation, 5G eternal entertainment, sports eternal spectacle, FB eternal friendship, Tinder eternal intimacy, housing societies eternal community… on it goes. But sure enough, ephemerality is but awaiting its turn. Wildfires, floods, hurricanes, landslides, war, riots, family breakdowns, layoffs, breakups, divorces… Scientists shout: ‘Arctic’s going, half of all species since WW-II gone, Anthropocene! Crossing 1.5° C will kill Civilisation.’ Deniers respond: ‘Bogus! Conspiracy! Vested interests! It’s cyclical, we can adapt, no scientific consensus.’

And the distracted modern mind goes and lies down in one of the five boxes of stages of grief that are laid out in our midst. The governments stand proudly in the one marked Denial: making plans, drawing up budgets, commissioning projects, funding studies, signing agreements, making speeches, invoking heroes, still worshipping Newton. Society gathers around in the Bargaining box: somehow trying to save its ice cream, ACs and indoor plumbing. The activists mill around in the Anger box, fixing blame, waving data. An estranged middle-aged mother of two I know is bouncing off the walls of the Depression box, high on chemicals, going for a record body count. A yoga class is rocking the Acceptance box.

But out of all of them, you know which demographic has it the truly, slam-dunk, no-comparison worst? The kids. They can see the adults’ conviction in the matrix evaporate. Heck, they can even see the matrix itself fraying on the margins. But in clear opposition to their burdened, fledgling cognition, they must keep up the grown-ups’ pretence. They must commit endless hours to mastering skills that will shore up this stumbling leviathan, which the AI is dead certain to replace anyway. All this while writing gushing essays on a matrix built on superior tech and inferior morals.

Time to ask the fashionable questions: What happened? Where did it all go wrong? I’ve been to symposia where people with three PhDs take hours to answer those. Perhaps, I should be original or at least authentically abstract: where have all the experts gotten us anyway? Could India have saved itself had it turned itself into a beacon of sustainability? Can my beloved Delhi, Punjab and HP save themselves if Uttarakhand or China’s glaciers melt, UP’s rivers dry up or if the distant oceans rise? What does that mean? Isn’t it that I need you? That you complete me?

Must we persist with Newton’s twin ‘gifts’ of reductionism and determinism even in the face of Shiva’s death dance in the Himalayas? Must we pretend it’s tourism, construction and cash crops we need and not nature and each other? Must we ridicule the only people and methodology that submit to peer review: the scientists, who are unanimous that our mode of existence is the real culprit. U.N.A.N.I.M.O.U.S. I’ve no intention of committing more paper to needless citations in corroboration.

Now, I’m not daft (or am I?), it’s clear we’re forced to adopt the reigning credo to survive short term. That’s pretty much the reason the whole world has converted itself in the image of its present hegemon. But can’t we for once show some real imagination and borrow that most glorious of beliefs: exceptionalism, albeit in the service of our worldview, of Gaia, of reclaiming our anthropic being? Can’t we for once stand by the ashes of Nalanda’s monks and look those who threaten to incinerate us unless we branded mammon’s sign on our pupils, square in the eye? Would we be able to look in our children’s eyes if we didn’t?

— The writer is an acclaimed musician

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