It’s not that the end is scary. Maybe cowards die a 1000
deaths…maybe because of my paranoia…due to being born after 3 miscarriages
which my mother had..as if I spent 9 months in a womb tomb where my three unborn
siblings had perished before me…my mother’s fears whether this one will survive
or not and see the light of day?... surely must have got transmitted to me and
gotten ingrained into my dna…..the existential question to be or not to be…as
expounded by the great cult hero…my all time legend and hero..the one and only
Dr RD Laing…author of “facts of life” where he says that the prenatal 9 months
have the greatest influence on our lives…hence my constant preoccupation with
endings…death…
The other is my ability to see the future…forecasting the
shape of things to come…the future shock…again the other great influence on my
life…Alvin Toffler….i use to have this angst in my late teens during the late
60s and early 70s…of last century…which seems to be aeons ago now…about the
dehumanisation of humanity…I used to write furiously…sometimes 70 pages a night
speeding away high on Dexedrine and grass…the trigger was my sense of being
schizoid because my father had dreams that I should sit for the ias exams and
become a bureaucrat..not only him but also my uncles…but I had my own dreams…I loved
my reading…writing…stoning…thinking…research….i could see clearly that the path
humanity was taking was leading us towards dehumanisation…everyone was bent on
being someone which would appear great in the eyes of society…bent on becoming
richer…more powerful…society was living within layers of cocoons of deceit…false
vanity…ego of being someone…anything but themselves…everything was one big lie…
The world being created around was consciously made to
reflect those make belief caricatures they imagined they were…hence society
designed monsters in spheres…to mimic their vanity…like outlandish cars…dresses…houses…along
with all the high energy guzzling lifestyles….neon lights… cars…air
conditioning….jet travel…5 star hotels and living….all this was a sure recipe
for disaster I could clearly see…but my ideas and thoughts and writings were
deemed mad even by my parents…but that did not deter me from pursuing my
beliefs…hence I chose research as a calling and means of livelihood…
Society went on its course of aggrandizement remorselessly…corporate
structures…economies…went deeper into debt and tried to out vie each other…hyper
competition was rearing its ugly gorgon
medusa head…threatening to destroy everything…then came the epic crashes of
enron and world com…my cries fell on deaf ears…a voice in the wilderness…
I had no qualms about the end towards which we were hurtling…in
fact my anthem from the 70s was…hurtling towards 2001 and beyond….this was
going be one more cycle of extinction…there were five earlier…but our problem
is that we humans are domesticated family species…the animal kingdom…never had
families…hence for them to face extinction was bit easier….already due to our
selfish ways…and anthropogenic traits…we are responsible for so many species dying
out…so our turn will come one day…either due to the robotic frankensteins we
have created which will snuff us out one day in the age of singularity like in
2001 a space odyssey….or the climate which again we have destroyed with our
senseless high energy carbon emitting lifestyles….in either case we are doomed…
But what hurts me is the mangled future we are bequeathing
to our children and grandchildren….i can see so very clearly the surreal
desolate landscape of 2030….2050…2070…my daughter would be 70 by 2050 and my
granddaughter 55 by 2070….indeed an extremely sci-cli-fi surreal scenario…which
is too frightening to behold…a lump in my throat because we are leaving behind
our blood and flesh to face the unreal future….there is no escape… we are deep
into the madness…
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