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LOOKING BACK

In one of Sir Terry Pratchett’s books, he imagines what idle chit-chat must be like for mayflies, who live for just 24 hours as adults. “We had proper sun in the good old hours. It were all yellow. None of this red stuff,” says a grizzled old mayfly. “And it was higher, too.”

Pratchett, one of the legends of the writing world, would probably have found it amusing that we take the end of the year so seriously, evaluate what has happened in the 365 days gone by, and make sincere plans to change ourselves in the next 365. Because in the grand scheme of things, 300-odd days isn’t much. For the human race, the main thing that reliably changes with the year is that they struggle to write the right date in their cheque books for the next couple of months.

But still. Not everything is to be measured on the grand scheme of things. Not everything needs to have a cosmic meaning for it to have a significance. Among us, there are people who overcame sickness in 2015. Some lost loved ones. Some got their first job. Some got married (I’ll leave it to them to decide whether to mark that as a positive or a negative). Some had children. Or they saw a perfect sunset, or shared a perfect moment, or felt completely at peace for a day sometime this year. This writer, joining you in your celebration, can only hope that even more joyous moments come your way next year. In the meantime, we can talk about the things that drew the world’s attention in the past 365 days.

If there’s one term that will remind Indians of the year 2015, it is “intolerance”. It started sometime in the second half of the year, when a man was lynched in a small UP town named Dadri. Apparently he was “eating beef”, thus “insulting” cows. The event became front-page news as an example of how minorities are persecuted in India, and how right-wing Hinduism is taking over after the BJP government’s formation. The rumour quickly spread that the police had confiscated the meat in his home, to check if it really was cow meat. What the rest of the story was, no one knows, because there are dozens of versions of this story, either condemning the lynch mob for their “intolerance”, or explaining that it wasn’t quite that way. But the message that the media took away from the incident was that India had become “intolerant” after the Hindu-dominated BJP had come into power. The message seemed reinforced whenever any news of attacks or abuse on minorities came up.

The debate snowballed into what’s called “Award Wapsi” (meaning “returning of awards”, a play on “Ghar Wapsi”, the nickname for the reconversion of Christian-converted tribals back into Hinduism). Authors, filmmakers, artists of all stripes began returning the awards they’d received from the government in protest of this increased intolerance. In most cases these awards had come to them from the previous governments. Several Facebook wags pointed out that this whole controversy had erupted very conveniently right at the time the Bihar state elections were due. Was it generated news, meant to be used as sloganeering fodder for the upcoming event?

In any case, the BJP lost in those elections, and as suddenly as the “intolerance” debate had sprung up, it disappeared from the headlines. Vestiges of this debate still linger around the Internet discussion forums and Letters to Editors.

It wasn’t the first time a damaging issue had come up to coincide with an agenda. During the monsoon session of Parliament this year, a scandal suddenly cropped up, pointing to three BJP politicians: Minister of External Affairs Sushma Swaraj was accused of helping Lalit Modi, accused in a corruption case, in getting a UK visa and leaving the country. Vasundhara Raje, Rajasthan chief minister, was also accused of collusion in business with Lalit Modi. A massive scam was unearthed in Madhya Pradesh’s college examination department, Vyapam. Some of the key whistleblowers of this scam were dead. Fingers pointed to the BJP Chief Minister Shivraj Singh Chouhan. These three issues were suddenly all over the newspapers and the TV news channels throughout the Parliament’s monsoon session, and just as mysteriously disappeared from the public eye as soon as the session ended. Of course, they were used as reasons to stall all work in Parliament for that session.

The best & worst

The real long-term impact of these issues is not to prove that this government is better, or worse, or that the Opposition is different in any way from the pervious Opposition parties. No, the larger impact is that more and more common people are beginning to be suspicious of mainstream media, and of the popular news stories of the day. The larger debate going on in Facebook comments, in barber shops and offices, is the relative merit and trustworthiness of our media. It may be that this is happening just because people are more connected, more well informed than they were a decade back. It may also be a side-effect of the massive popular support that Modi continues to enjoy from the population, prompting them to speak up against anti-government news stories. Reality is always more complicated than the simple bylines and 100-word descriptions captured in news reports. Expect to see more popular movements and petitions placed before the government in the coming days.

There is already a good example of how an alert and active population can make a difference on the ground: the flooding in Chennai. Multiple cyclones and bad city planning got together to submerge large parts of Chennai this month. The government response was what it has always been, “relief efforts”, “airborne inspections”, “compensation for those affected”, and so on. If at all it differed, it was in the magnitude of the effort. But the number of common people who got together to get food, water, supplies and general help to Chennai residents has been extraordinary. Our Facebook timelines are full of citizen helpline numbers, people are offering space in their homes for the unlucky ones, and innumerable trucks and cars have set out from nearby towns, taking along whatever is needed to help Chennai. All this without a top-down government-driven co-ordination.

When the Modi government took over last year, people awaited with sky-high expectations. Not all of these expectations have been delivered, but we do see some positive differences in the functioning. The well-organised airlift of Indian citizens from war-torn Yemen was a good example. The logistics for this evacuation were so well organised that several other countries asked us to help evacuate their citizens as well. Along with that we have a slew of announcements for improvements to the Railway network, roads, the ongoing debate on the GST bill... it remains to be seen how well the government performs over its five-year term. According to economic surveys, the country is doing well. We’re waiting for results, and so far, are hopeful.

Closer home...

In the meantime, I, as a Bengalurean, was not really proud of the meme that emerged from Bangalore and caught the country’s attention this year. This was, of course, the burning lake at Bellandur. We’ve been seeing nauseating foam arising from the lake waters for years now, sometimes overflowing the banks and spreading out on the road. But this year, the pollution got so bad that the foam actually caught fire. Videos of the fire and the overflowing foam went viral. The other pieces of news from Bangalore weren’t particularly hopeful either: Namma Metro delayed again, new plans for road infrastructure announced but nowhere near completion, protests by common folks against the pathetic roads. But hey, new Starbucks and Krispy Kreme branches opened, so something must be going well, right?

The continued Syrian Civil War this year triggered a humanitarian crisis, and an unprecedented response: lakhs of Syrians left their homeland and sought refuge in Europe. Countries like Germany, Turkey and France opened their doors and welcomed large numbers of refugees. Perhaps the most enduring image of this crisis was that of Aylan Kurdi, a three year old boy who was crossing the Mediterranean Sea with his family, from Turkey to Greece. The boat in which he was travelling capsized, and Kurdi drowned, along with his elder brother, Ghalib. His body was found washed up on the beach in Turkey: a horrifying reminder of the toll that war takes on the innocent. For those who read the accompanying news story, the chilling footnote said it all: the route that Aylan’s family had taken to reach Europe was considered one of the safest smuggling routes.

In our immediate neighbourhood, Nepal was shaken with the earthquake that killed over 9,000 people and injured more than 23,000.

Terrorism has become so common that its mere occurrence doesn’t make the news anymore. Nevertheless, two separate attacks, both in Paris, seemed to bracket the year 2015. In January, we had an attack on the offices of the satirical magazine Charlie Hebdo. The trigger was perceived to be their most recent issue, which featured an illustration of the Prophet Moham- med. A dozen people in the office died, along with as many injured. The attack set off a worldwide debate about intolerance (that word again). Then, in November, multiple co-ordinated shootings happened in Paris, eerily reminiscent of the Mumbai shootings of 26/11. About 130 people were killed, and the world went off into a panic again. ISIS took responsibility for the attack, and in response, France launched airstrikes against ISIL territory. We don’t know where this war will lead us, but the full extent of the war, and its impact on the world, is likely to be known only in retrospect.

As always, the virtual world follows its own dictates, and there’s no telling what tiny thing could go viral. The average netizen is hungrily looking for the next distraction, something to argue about and take him away from the humdrum normal world. It could be a cat photo, a satirical look at the world, or a video of pranks played by college kids. Even by these low standards, the “dress” was a phenomenon in online discussions forums. The “dress” was a photo of a wedding dress, posted on the image sharing site Tumblr. Depending on how you interpreted it, it could be seen as either blue and black in colour, or white and gold. Apparently, at the wedding function where the bride wore the dress, the musician’s band delayed playing because all the members were busy arguing over the colour. On the Net, the arguments continued, and both sides were equally vehement they were right. The discussion moved into science, and perception, and the effect of natural lighting on the eyes. Eventually, as all such Net discussions go, the topic was forgotten in the clamour over the next new topic. (But, personally, I still think it was blue and black. So there.)

Final goodbye

In the writing world, we lost Terry Pratchett this year. His fantasy books, set on the imaginary Discworld, had the knack of mirroring the absurdities of daily life in our world, and making them more bearable. His death is one of the reasons why he belongs in this article; but then, with his great body of writing and seemingly inexhaustible store of quips for every occasion, he could belong in any article, whether it’s about the stock market, Nietzsche, or horror movies.

Bollywood lost one of its beloved actors in Saeed Jaffrey. He was one of those people whom everyone knew: whether they were fans of Satyajit Ray or David Dhawan, Hrishikesh Mukherjee or Richard Attenborough. Jaffrey had created his space in the minds of movie goers that will not be filled easily. We also lost Aadesh Srivastava, composer in over a hundred films, early to cancer.

Movers & shakers

Please, let us not talk about the Hindi movie world’s other achievements in a year where Prem Ratan Dhan Payo and Bajrangi Bhaijaan were the year’s highest-grossing releases. No matter which way you cut it, making benign but essentially vacuous movies, and making huge amounts of money off them, doesn’t constitute furthering the art form in any way. Hopefully, we will have something more to talk about next year.

Let us not call all these things “the year in a nutshell”. Let us call this, rather, a list of things that were discussed in office canteens and parties. The things that we felt compelled to share with others, in real life or virtually. It doesn’t matter whether something happened in Bangalore, Nepal, or Syria. We hear of it with just the same intensity in this connected age. With life becoming faster and faster, we feel that we are no longer just individuals, family people, community members, or city-dwellers. We are, rather, citizens of the world. As Pratchett put it, “This isn’t life in the fast lane, it’s life in the oncoming traffic.” Maybe this feeling will make us better people, more capable of understanding the pain of others? Or, will we use it to find only like-minded people and gang up into virtual ghettos? Time will tell.