My knowledge of Indian politics is sketchy at the most. Whenever an election is due, I get very excited and watch all the news channels prodigiously, attempting to glean as much information as I can. At other times, I avoid news channels like the plague because I simply don’t want to know how many more people died in terror attacks in Jammu and Kashmir, or how the Taliban has been beating up young women in Pakistan. In a way, even natural disasters seem less horrendous than watching news stories that focus on how human beings feel impelled to treat their fellows with so much inhumanity.
I watched The Road last night. In a post-apocalyptic world, all the trappings of civilization disappeared, and humans hunted humans. While that bleak, horrific reality may be a comfortable distance away from the airconditioned multiplex, watching the news makes it seem more than likely that that is what we will become, that we will forget we were ever anything but animals, fighting to survive in any way we can. That it will become possible for us to hunt down, kill and consume our own, to see suffering without mercy but with triumph, to care for nothing at all but our own survival. And for what? A few more hours in a dark, dank, sunless lifeless world.
I’d like to make the members of the Shiv Sena or the Taliban watch The Road. I’d like to see what they think of that situation and I’d like to ask them how far they’d go to survive in a world where there is no religion, no state, no supposed higher purpose to be fighting for but just pure, naked, ugly self-preservation.
This pettiness that they engage in, petty battles over land and religion and ethnicity and gender – battles whose causes are unclear, whose only virtue lies in mobilising the mob, in spreading fear, terror and anarchy – seems to me the first step towards the terrible, soulless world of The Road.
And that, is why I choose not to watch the news, I bury myself in the past and I refuse to see what the world is. Because if I did, I would be afraid to live in it.