There is a quote often ascribed to Rumi which roughly translates as, “Yesterday I was brilliant, so I aspired to change the world; today I am wise, so I attempt to change myself.” Something about these profound lines struck me as I sat down to write a riff on the year that is just going by. In a world best described as VUCA—a term military strategists use to summarise situations of volatility, uncertainty, complexity and ambiguity—the prospects of a serious analysis were indeed tempting.
Despite my initial attempt to be profound, I was thrown completely off guard by the brilliance of the new Madhya Pradesh chief minister. He announced that as an element of his battle against rampant westernisation, he intends to shift the prime meridian from Greenwich to a line that runs through Ujjain. The noble objective is, of course, of changing the entire world’s notion of time, which is just what India in his vision is embarking on.
In doing this, he is probably blissfully unaware that he’s also unwittingly going to run into some internecine problems because India’s own prime point for local time calculations is Mirzapur in Uttar Pradesh. We have a non-westernised and rather imposing saffron-clad Yogi who will not be very happy to see his state lose status in this arena.
In all seriousness, this worthy, whose name you will have to pardon me from recollecting instantly, has insisted that the global prime meridian is merely another example of westernisation that he intends to dismantle, and by extension, he probably will want to change the calendar too. This is a rather extreme expression of India’s famed athiti deva notion in motion. What an amazing future lies ahead of our newly-minted citizenry. Even this year-ender piece may now need to be recalibrated in terms of when it reaches you, dear reader, and what date it actually displays.
But it is perhaps unfair to lay all the blame for my being derailed from an entirely sombre analysis on the poor chap’s shoulders. After all, we have had some similarly priceless moments recently, even before he-who-can’t-be-named swept the elections. Two instances come immediately to mind. Both involved dates that are far into the future and which, given the new Ujjain declaration, are liable to be altered.
Our penchant for reiterating our belief in athiti devo bhava was omnipresent and unstoppable during the year. We cheerfully announced our willingness to host the COP32 summit in India. Even more heroic was the watershed offer of hosting the Olympics in 2036. Speaking at the IOC session in Mumbai, the prime minister said hosting the Olympics is an “age-old dream” for India. (If you’ve not been getting those Olympic dreams, then you clearly are a closet anti-nationalist.)
Though a city was not specified in the bid, most of us were mesmerised enough to assume that Ahmedabad, which boasts the largest stadium in the world named after you-know-who, would be the likely contender as the main host city. Unverified reports suggest that massive sports infrastructure is currently being created in a ghost city close by. Recent relaxations for booze consumption in that prohibition-inflicted state are seen in the context of relaxations yet to come. Those chronicling the year wouldn’t have missed that this bid happened within a spitting distance from our hosting the World Cup cricket finals in Ahmedabad. Surely, some leeway needs to be extended for our enthusiasm for the athiti deva business, or maybe some diversion was needed from our heroes’ inexplicable loss on that city’s cricket pitch.
Back to the athiti deva theme. The irony was locally ignored that our offer to host the next COP summit came right after we’d refused to be bullied into signing the COP28 declaration. We had argued that the development imperatives ahead of us should allow us the flexibility and freedom to not adhere to the severe standards being set by the already-developed world. The main COP28 declaration was signed by 124 countries, with top emitters US and India absent from that list. For us, a sticking point emerged in the commitment to reduce greenhouse gases for cooling applications in healthcare, a measure India finds difficult to comply with.
And, as the Ujjain declaration grandiosely ignored reality, here too we chose to ignore studies that suggest that climate disasters in unforeseeable Black Swan-type events will ravage countries like us the most. This severity being higher is inevitable given our enormous population that is vulnerable to VUCA situations and whose access to health services is minimal or non-existent at most times.
It would be unfair to end my take on the year without a strident tone of confidence. Apart from the angst it may cause by sounding rather supercilious, one must confess to confusion. So for me, the most confusing and perhaps less contentious aspect of the year gone by has been the display of India's atmanirbhar hard power. Surely it can’t go unremarked on.
No, it isn’t the brouhaha over our placing a rover on the lunar surface—that did receive its fair share of bhakti and bhava. I'm not sure whether we really hit a terror suspect in Canada or whether their department of justice is chasing a chimera. Even just being an accused in this kind of case, of mopping up terror suspects, is substantial. There’s no doubt that, on the world stage, a powerful new India has taken centre-stage. So is this our collective future or is athiti deva our theme song? Or are these fragments of a dystopian Metaverse dream? So the question now hangs: are you ready, Player One?
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Dilip Cherian
Image guru who strategises campaigns for businesses and does litigation landscaping