Wrapping up a devastating decade!

What pains me most when I look back on the decade that was, is the changing nature of global terrorism. No other decade perhaps has been so fraught with paradoxes: on the one hand, the world was condensed into a small global village, thanks to the revolution in information technology; on the other hand, distances between communities, residing side by side, increased beyond measurement. While multiculturalism officially entered the state parlance, mad rush at ethnic cleansing reached a hitherto unforeseen level. In India, nobody seemed to have learned any lesson from the Babri Masjid demolition riots! The Godhra riots in Gujarat, the Malegaon blasts, the unprecedented rise of Hindutva, violence against religious minorities − all of these introduced the most dehumanizing chapters in the history of humanity. The 26/11 Taj Hotel massacre in Mumbai brought the drama of man slaughter to a climax, which, as things are, would never see a denouement. The decade closed under the dark clouds of the Telengana demand for a state separate from Andhra Pradesh, once again throwing into dismal relief the drama of fragmentation of the country that began after the independence and is still going strong. On the other hand, the demand for a Gorkhaland, separate from West Bengal, had been making headlines for quite a few months now! And to top it all, there was the unspeakably inhuman Nandigram debacle that marked a turn to the barbaric age. Amidst this entire hullabaloo for a separate state, religious purity, communal violence, emerged the Maoist rebellion, giving sleepless nights to the government. May be one good thing was the state recognition of same-sex desire as natural. But what was ridiculously ironic was the whole tragicomic drama that was played out by the media in the ‘highly saleable’ hype of legalizing (!) something that was always already natural.

While we were happy that we have finally arrived with high-end technologies entering the middle class home, none of was really bothered about the increasing gap between the rich and the poor. All seemed hunky-dory, for the media represented it as such. No one really cared what happened in the remotest areas, miles away from the globalizing urban centres. The new Indian middle class were blissfully unaware of the world beyond McDonald’s, KFC, Shopping Malls, Coke and Pepsi. It took a Slumdog Millionaire to uncover the murky reality that co-existed with the glam and glitz of the country’s economic capital. And in remote villages of Uttar Pradesh, West Bengal, Andhra Pradesh, etc., people still starved to death. The impact of global warming was felt the hard way: in lots of villages the ground water level decreased considerably, super-cyclones hit eastern India time and again taking innumerable lives, and above all a remarkable change in the climate was felt across the country. And not to forget the colossal tsunamis that hit South Asia, almost giving signals of an apocalypse. The great Copenhagen Summit on environmental issues that closed the decade did not really predict a very bright future. However, we hope to live on! All we need are love, patience and a bit of selflessness. May the new decade ring out all that was depressing and ring in life, in true sense of the term!