Naked without the mask

  

My understanding of history and the present tells me that if a nation-state perpetuates a crime against any section of the society, it is also bequeathing pain and suffering to the generations to come after it.

Guilt, shame, anger and grief linger on for years to come. Any nation state that wants a brighter future for its progeny must pause and atone for its past, if it has any vision for a better future.

So far, this has not happened anywhere in the world. Germany in the West and Japan in the East are probably the only nation states that have time and again confronted their past sins and expressed remorse for it.

There is a powerful philosophical concept in the East called ‘karma’ which time and again the pop-culture blurts out without understanding that it is a very real thing. Karma will follow you like the albatross in The Rime of the Ancient Mariner.

Why is it that each time the society moves on as if nothing really happened in the past, the ghosts come calling?

All the drugs have been illegalised and its use has been made criminal, but one drug has escaped the dragnet of the keepers of the universe and that is Power.

High on this drug, the worst crimes in the world have been committed and the garb of civilisation is not good enough to hide the raw dastardliness of this drug. You may have elections, you may have democracy, but till this narcotic is illegalised and its users are thrown into the deepest, darkest prisons, nothing will change.

Why is it that we love to pick out a tyrant and vilify all that he/she has done long after eliminating the tyrant? Because while the tyrant is in power, the people are in the grasp of its strong narcotic effects and cannot see what is going on. Unless the people get out of this haze, and understand that we do not need to be drugged all the time to perform our acts, we are not going to be able to destroy the tyrant as he/she lives.

We are all addicts.

Drunk on this power reflected from our narcissistic leaders and nationalist emotions, we were sure hurtling into a kind of order that is achieved by annihilating all anarchists. As far as I see, this would have continued, had the world not been forced into putting the brakes on it, by a microscopic being, which we do not even yet know the origins of.

So here we are now, with so many people in power, a pressing concern for today’s world is a lack of leadership. During this time of ‘war’ and that too with an ‘invisible’ enemy, how naked do these narcissistic personas appear! All those who supported these men in power have no option but to wear masks and stay at home. Because all they want is for this invisible enemy to go away so that they can go back to the drama that they were enacting.

It’s been five months now and the virus is showing no signs of having left the scene. How do we claim the new world order that was on the horizon — an order that would have allowed us to break free of the shackles of history or even come out of our addictions?

Consider this: There is no way that physical distancing; washing hands or wearing masks is going to rid us or our malady. What if the only way out is to change?

Destruction of the existing order has always been a painful process for humans. But, the pandemic has shown us that something's are beyond our control. If the pre-pandemic era was what you would call normal, then please let us not get a new normal.