We are not alone in the world in being insular as a people. Let there be the smoke of war and burnt flesh wafting in and mixing with crop stubble ash in our air. Or the noise of people’s coups around the corner. Regimes toppling as if in a game theory scenario come true, countries threatening to disappear off the map. Yes, the world order itself can shift its axis. It really did, in 2024, the year that saw the birth pangs of a world about to come.
But we don’t look up from our phones. Let the Cassandras say the world could be ending, they always say that anyway. Our traumas are related to a web series ending. Catch us taking our eyes off the last over of a T20 match, a Turkish thriller, or whatever your poison is. Just give us our caramelised popcorn in our pushback multiplex seats, and we Indians won’t trouble the world thereafter. At least for the next couple of hours. We never get much troubled by it anyway.
We are not alone in the world in various other ways either. The year we are leaving behind was the hottest ever since temperature recording on a planetary scale began in 1880. Come to think of it, that means hotter than any time during the entire life span of many modern nations, including ours. Nationalism itself, as an accepted way of dividing up the planet, has been in full force for only about a century. Could that finally be a trigger for us to think together as a species?
A polar ice cap’s chance in hell. We are bargaining with each other for a 21st-century crisis with a 19th-century mindset. As if 41 extra days of “dangerous heat”, which is what we had in 2024 (and promises to be just a trailer), is the sort of thing that will only touch Karachi and not Coimbatore. In reality, there’s not even the deluded comfort of Niemöller’s classic line that it may “first come for x” (that ‘x’ being someone else). Everyone sinks—or burns—together. We thought Covid taught us that.
New Delhi was, of course, hot for other reasons, too, in 2024. It’s among the few major world capitals where the ruling party was sworn back in after a general election, though trimmed a little in terms of its body mass index. It was a busy year for democracy globally. The Pew Research Center counted well over 60 countries that saw elections, and called it “a difficult year for incumbents”.
Only some, like the BJP in India, managed to endure. It was Narendra Modi, therefore, who rubbed shoulders with other world-dominating figures who don’t have to bother much with elections at all, like a Xi or a Putin, at the BRICS summit in Kazan. In Japan, the ruling party had been an incumbent almost uninterruptedly since 1955. In 2024, it survived one of its biggest scares, and the opposition got its best score ever. In France, too, Emmanuel Macron barely survived a snap poll and is now very dependent on allies. Sounds familiar?
What else was common? More than just the number of fallen incumbents, the Pew Center helpfully told us that voters in many countries were “rattled by rising prices, divided over cultural issues and angry at the political status quo, (and thus) sent a message of frustration”. No one who bothers to look up from a homemade TikTok video in rural India will find that idea too foreign. Likewise, though more invisible, the corporatisation of elections is truly global. Glib “election executives” who manage vast armies that profile voters digitally and create marketing material for sundry parties are everywhere.
Many ruling parties did not survive. The Indian imagination may still be nostalgically colonised by the goings-on in the United Kingdom, where a Rishi Sunak managed a charmingly British statement of self-deprecation with his “life comes at you fast” speech. But really, our former masters do not matter much in the new world order — their role is practically over, except as a caddie to the Big Boy who struts around the entire golf course.
And that is, of course, where the most famous regime change happened. And Donald Trump promises to be a Black Swan event all by himself. Why should the post-Covid world have it so easy? He may be just the biggest piece of evidence in a world-wide lurch to the Right, and there’s much interest in terms of pure political theory. He comes in 20 days after the last Sun of 2024 sets but occupies the very frontiers of Right Libertarian ‘minarchism’—a self-contradictory being— along with someone who came in 20 days before the first sunrise of 2024: Argentinian president Javier Milei.
Someone who dislikes the state as the big boss of the biggest state. How does that work? Most people in Gaza, those still left that is, have no time to spend on the results of that experiment. They have their own laboratory, where they are the Guinea pigs. Treblinka might have passingly (and tremblingly) felt a touch of déja vu as some estimates of the numbers consigned to history ranged up towards 200,000. A letter published in the Lancet suggesting such a range finally caused some heads to turn in the world.
How many died in Gaza in 2024? The factual answer is that we will never really know. How many were babies? That’s a ‘we don’t know’ within a ‘we don’t care’. Counting the dead is a grim and boring but professional exercise, and there are analysts who pore over all kinds of data and results from statistical modelling—satellite imagery of the acreage of bombed buildings, and the like—but it’s always a range. In the Ukraine-Russia war, the total number of dead and injured is apparently about one million. In Syria, in the last dozen years or so, the death toll alone is upwards of 600,000. How many Israeli soldiers have died? They don’t tell so easily.
Too much of a digression. The world is only interested in who will finally control the untapped lithium beneath Ukraine’s soil, said to be the world’s largest. Whether Israel wants just the land, or also the water and anything else that may lie under the land. Whether a gas pipeline from the Arab states can now pass through Syria onward to Europe via Turkey, through a peace enforced by the children of ISIS (nurtured by the Big Boys). Can Syria fall off the map altogether? Can countries cease to exist? Why did South Korea have three presidents in one month? Will Iran survive? …
Will we get tickets for Pushpa 2 on the weekend?
Santwana Bhattacharya
Editor
(santwana@newindianexpress.com)
(Follow her on X @santwana99)