2012 – Bye bye earthlings.

The doomsday predictions have oscillated from sanctified despair to amusement. Let me not spoil the party mood by juggling hideous consternation or brood about this never ending debate of whether this year is going to be the end of this civilization. Films like 2012, showing an orgy of violent destruction hardly provokes a thought in me other than titillation because I have no doubt that this should be the end. Another member of the nay Sayers group…. Well that is as far from the truth as you are from reality. The truth that we espouse is the convenient truth that is comfortable to digest and which is incessantly poured in our delirious minds by the ‘corporate’ sponsored media. The same ‘Corporate’ who caress you with greed and at the same time makes our mind sick and tired and pushes you to a purgatory plane of existence. Well once our life is ensnared by the corporate behemoths, we find peace by gloriously calling it the discreet life of the bourgeoisie. The American Dream.

Let’s look at our personal lives. Alienation, aimlessness and detachment seem to be the order of our modern life. What is our identity?

Swami Vivekananda had said “Am I, then, nothing but a combination of material substance? The Vedas declare, No I am a spirit living in a body. I am not the body. The body will die, but I shall not die. And a soul with a certain tendency will by the laws of affinity take birth in that body which is the fittest instrument for the display of that tendency.”

Well not any more can this be true. We discover ourselves by the relationships we have or develop. Then we further discover ourselves or as the Great Swami said “the tendency of our soul” by the work we do. Economists and Social scientists can go on debating about the condition of the economy but it leaves no doubt in my mind that half of the working population of this globe, the lower half of the pyramid, does not enjoy a fixed vocation. With emerging technology and robotic engineering, they have been reduced to a stooge. The day is not far when humans would be employed to become mannequin (With FDI in retail it can soon be an attractive career option for ‘beautiful’ and ‘handsome’ impoverished youngsters. What an abominable act that would be for the soul!). When you change your work you change your identity. Same is true for relationships. We are maimed by this change of identity to slither and become a boor, and then we are only left with the power to scowl at fellow humans. We can constantly ask ourselves “Are you against or in favour of the market? Against or in favour of state action? Just answer the question – no qualifications, no ‘ifs’ and ‘buts’ please.

If you are lucky enough to strafe through the protracted clamour of the Education Market and if they have failed to convince you of being disparage you are entitled to gloat effulgently in this squeamish atmosphere. Among animals they eat as much as their stomachs can hold, but among humans after you have had your fill, you make yourselves ensconced by stocking as much as the government warehouse can hold and then you destroy the rest and still look dainty with your gelled plait. Let the proletariat purr in dissatisfaction and battle for food. To lurch to super success just sponsor the winning party in the elections, keep bureaucrats well oiled and you have a license for existence in the higher plane. Humans ostracize other fellow humans on the basis of wealth.

In December 1939, Rabindranath Tagore wrote to his friend Leonard Elmhirst, the English philanthropist and social reformer, “It does not need a defeatist to feel deeply anxious about the future of millions who, with all their innate culture and their peaceful traditions are being simultaneously subjected to hunger, disease, exploitations foreign and indigenous, and the seething discontents of communalism”.

In his prison diary Jawaharlal Nehru wrote, “Perhaps it is well that (Tagore) died now and did not see the many horrors that are likely to descend in increasing measures on the world and on India”.

The human soul of 2012 is so battled with grief of dream shattering years, fear of survival and wounded with fierce desire that our “clear stream of reason has lost its way into the dreary desert sand of dead habit”.