By Paramjit Singh Bakhshi
Charles Dickens opening lines, in The Tale of Two Cities, “It was the best of times, it was the worst of times”, are applicable equally to our present era. The opening of the frontiers of information, astonishingly through the narrow hose of the optic fibre cable, has given us the opportunity to explore beyond the precincts of locally available knowledge. We now Google the world seeking data, news, views, articles, quotes, songs, videos or just gossip. On the flip side, we are also showered by unsolicited information, in print and in multimedia, which in this fast-paced life we have very little time to process and make sense of. As advertisers using sensual imagery to market mundane products are no doubt aware, we absorb most information subconsciously and our rational mind has about as much control as the rudder of a small boat in a storm. Our plight is similar to that of a musician who upon being handed a million notes to work with, instead of the usual eight, will find it easier to make a broader diversity of sound but impossible to create a brilliant symphony.
The problem of plenty is as acute a crisis as the predicament of having too little. Too bright a light is as blinding as darkness.
As with any flood, this informational deluge is washing away all our familiar landmarks and definitions and leading us from certainty to doubt. In physics, the atom which was thought to be indivisible first, then pictured to be made up of protons, neutrons and electrons is today known to have yet smaller particles such as quarks and leptons, the nature of which is still unclear. Even the scenery of the larger universe is getting hazier with newer galaxies being discovered ever so often. Our social edifices are either crumbling or morphing rapidly. Monarchies have become merely entertaining and ceremonial spectacles; multinational companies have more influence and wealth than many governments and democracies today are influenced more by lobbies and less by the electorate. Capitalism now socialises losses of large private corporations while communism manufactures goodies for the free market. The dangers of what we long considered economic progress are becoming visible and not just in terms of ecological damage. Suicide bombers force upon us newer and contradictory definitions and compel us to confront complex realities. Psychiatry in spite of almost a century long exploration of the human brain, still struggles to chart the diverse wellsprings of human motivation and in medicine newer diseases and their evolving strains continue to confound us and often the placebo is as effective as the well-researched pill. The structure of the family has undergone radical change with single parents and same sex marriages and even the benevolent and omniscient patriarch, God, has become gender neutral and feeble. Though we may not believe in His plan, in spite of all information and futuristic models we are still unsure what tomorrow will bring. Even if change is the only constant thing the pace of change has accelerated to dizzying speed and as our intelligences struggles to stay in top gear, mental disease has become the top killer.
We are individuals now and surprisingly discerning ones at that with strong subconscious springs of very personal likes and dislikes. On this level we have choices ranging from sixty flavours of mustard to millions of songs, and a plethora of beliefs as diverse as the range of body tattoos. Most of us profess to be liberals preferring to live and let live, though often made insensitive either by the regularity of the televised catastrophes or the necessity of making a living or a fortune and reconciled to live and let die. This does not mean we do not care but just that we are confused about how much and for whom to care. The young, the old, the mentally and physically challenged, the workers and the unemployed, the exploited and the disempowered, the criminals, the juvenile delinquents, the alcoholics and the addicts, the refugees, the tortured, the minorities, the vanishing cultures, the heritage buildings, old manuscripts, the polluted oceans and rivers, receding glaciers, the poisoned air, and the endangered species of flora and fauna all require care today.
In a way it is has been a collective loss of innocence for the entire human race. Nothing today is certain, sacrosanct or above reproach and everything that was taboo or evil is today at least understandable, if not fully acceptable. Our minds have truly opened and we have spring cleaned the inconvenient cobwebs of all intellectual certainties and judgements. There is hardly a lion left amongst us who can roar with conviction and insight and we are the fad driven sheep that inhabit the world. We fuss about small choices but are unable to identify, far less confront larger and more perilous issues.
Perhaps this is the result of carrying in our heads, the weighty daily basket of practical concerns imposed by our life in the city where we live together with angst in unrealistically large numbers. We need to stay informed to choose school and colleges, remain alert to find and retain stressful jobs, cope with traffic, pay our bills and taxes, iron our clothes, cook our food, find time for the children, pets and friends and be sensitive to our neighbours who live not just next to us but also above our heads and below our feet. We are forever multi-tasking and in spite of our lack of physical fitness work harder to be competitive, efficient and effective. In a life time we interact with more people than our ancestors did in ten generations or more and have many compartments to slot our diverse relationships. We have casual acquaintances, boy and girl friends, best friends, one-night stands, flings, spouses and ex-spouses, business partners, bosses, subordinates and colleagues, clubs, societies, associations and support groups. Still, we are lonely and remain largely unconnected emotionally. Individuality both defines and isolates us.
Yet we walk a narrow well beaten path together. We all agree on the relevance of economics and the increasing irrelevance of religion. Tacitly rather than explicitly we have made businessmen and economists the high priests of our creed and developed esoteric wealth generating strategies involving cerebral calisthenics and complex computer programmes. We leverage, hedge, write our options, make bull spreads, straddle, do technical and fundamental analysis, future projections, commodity and stock futures, trade currencies and even measure volatility. We can make millions in myriad ways but we also believe that the cornerstone for all economic progress is consumption, waste and debt.
We are masters of technology as also its victims. We invent tools to make our lives easier and end up being tormented by them. We have invented cell phones, computers, and jet engines and have been to the moon but are caught in a world wide web where we must work longer and longer hours to pay for gadgets of productivity and connectivity. We have refrigerators, air conditioners, high fidelity televisions in homes where we hardly live and which we don’t fully own. We are the citizens of the highway and spend a large part of our life on the asphalt and a larger part in the virtual world and we hardly know the feeling of soft grass under our feet.
Walking on the informational super highway has exposed us to the genuine complexity of all issues whether scientific, social, economic, ethical or humanistic. It has made us realise that though we can look at everything with the microscope of our reason we are still kids tinkering with mental Legos when it comes to building enduring philosophies or a consistent picture of the changing world.
This is our life and we know no other way to live. Except when we take our ritualistic annual holiday. It is then that we prefer to go back a century or more, to a part of the world less populous, less developed and less stressful. To places where we can laze in the sand, sip mojitos or beer and devour, under a sun umbrella, exotic food with some light fiction.
Irrespective of us the gigabyte juggernaut moves on: the momentum too large for thought.
By Paramjit Singh Bakhshi
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