This has always made me wonder: Life is just so finite, yet we take ourselves, our views, our opinions, our high grounds and so much else, all so seriously. This sure is a modern-day disease.
Or is it? Is this the very proudly branded “animal spirit” of achievement and distinction that we humans celebrate? When you clearly know you have only 100 metres to sprint, you give it your best. And everyone wants to better the best. And is this animal spirit, that one spark that motivates all of us to run and do better than the best?
Any thought, and indeed any argument, can be spun out in every direction. As can this. Let me however add a contemporary zing to this rather old question and even older debate. Let’s look at what’s happening around us and decide whether things have changed so much that we need to ask this question again. Are we taking ourselves a bit too seriously? And must we not?
The pandemic, which now threatens to fan out into a fourth wave sooner than later and engulf every one of us who has not had a taste of the virus as yet, has knocked us on the knuckles. But has it taught us a lesson as yet?
The pandemic pointed it out to us all too sharply that we are not as large as we assume ourselves to be. A tiny little virus is able to get us locked indoors. A tiny little virus is able to show us our roosting places. And that very tiny little virus got us to our knees in terms of both livelihood and life being threatened to a point of disbelief. But then man is resilient, isn’t he? He put together a vaccine and took every step to cheat the virus on the rampage. Overall, if one is to view it from the perspective of who won and who lost, the battle is still on. However, that animal spirit of man to conquer it all in the face of every adversity seems to have prevailed.
The pandemic pointed out and brought to the fore our every sin of omission and commission. It told us we have gone berserk with our individual and collective greed. We keep chopping trees. When push comes to shove, we replace them with outdoor ambient air purifiers. We industrialise without a care. Despite all the stringent controls on pollution and polluting industries in the country, the AQI levels across our big cities and smaller towns are in a mess. We don’t bother about the birds and the bees. Our noise pollution levels are the highest ever, and our cities are today defined bigger and better by the noise they make. We run faster than the rest to get the largest numbers of people to eat the largest quantity of things they must not. Salt, sugar, fat and more. Our finite life goals are truly infinite.
Have we learnt a lesson? Have we made corrections? The answer is really out there for all of us to see and feel. Yes, we have felt every one of these pain points. And yes we have thought these very clean and noble thoughts. Yes, we have wanted to rectify many of our actions. But have we? The answer is a big no. When pushed, we think. When that push is over, we nudge the noble thought of corrective action in our life and lifestyle away. It is business as usual. The comma moment of Covid is over. It was but a hurdle. It was a comma and not a full-stop moment. We are done with it, and we will move on.
Oblivious as ever. And this is not a motherhood statement about society all around us. It is a statement that packs the truth about you and I. Think. We are like this only. We will be like this only.
While the pandemic is an umbrella moment, a moment that all of us all across the world shared commonly, the world today shares different fracas points regionally. Different nudge-points, push-points and cataclysms of their own.
Look into the Ukraine-Russia conflict. This conflict that has the potential to develop into the early first-scent skirmish of the Third World War ahead, is yet another mega-event that showcases greed, short-termism and the ego of man that just does not want to go servile all too soon. As Vladimir Putin wants to aggressively push ahead his agenda, the NATO world is biting its nails in horror, trying to use every peaceful tool to quell a completely non-peaceful war that has entered the 63rd day as you read this. If life is really finite, mustn’t better sense prevail? Obviously not many of us believe in the finite life. There is some truth the most aggressive leaders of our new world know, which none of us do. Life is not finite after all. Not for nations and their completely dedicated leaders pushing the nation’s agenda ahead at the cost of the world at large. In the meantime, very finite lives are being snuffed out (at least 2,665 at last count in this war).
Look at our immediate neighbour, Sri Lanka. The country is in a mess. The mess is economic, in its social order, in its historically wide disparity of the rich versus the poor, and open lies the fact that the country has no money to move forward. The world needs to come to its rescue. As the country grapples with this truth, there seem to be no ‘finite life’ activists around. The belief is one that every ego will prevail. Every fight to save every seat in Parliament will begin. And most of these will run at the cost of the fact that real issues need to be solved for real economic issues to be resolved. For the moment, the issues being addressed are cosmetic at best.
End question then. Are we taking ourselves too seriously? Are we missing the real issues for the ones that have been made up for our creature comfort? Are we clutching on to a bag of candy that will run out, faster than we know? And who is to bell this cat of apparent lie? This apparent deceit?
Harish Bijoor
Brand Guru & Founder, Harish Bijoor Consults
(harishbijoor@hotmail.com)