We observe the world around us and we find hardly anything that is going right around us. A ceasefire has descended on Gaza, some hostages dead and alive have been returned to their families by Hamas. Israel for its part has released a good number of Palestinians it had kept incarcerated for a long time.
That is somewhat good news. But when the demand is made that the remains of all dead hostages must be retrieved and returned to the Israeli authorities, you are left a trifle surprised. With the apocalyptic destruction of Gaza by Israel in the past two years, how can one reasonably expect that the dead hostages will or can be located? And, yes, why is no one asking that the thousands of Palestinians dead under the rubble in Gaza be brought to the surface? They do not matter?
It is on these realities around one that one loses any reason to feel content with life. On social media, much talk goes on about the Indian actor Salman Khan’s reference to Balochistan and Pakistan. People have taken umbrage at Khan’s alleged attempt to see Balochistan, Pakistan’s largest province, as an entity separate from the rest of Pakistan. Was that a slip of tongue on his part? Or was there something of the deliberate? Be that as it may, it is not what Salman Khan says about Balochistan. It is how you empathize with the Baloch, who have been pummelled by the Pakistan army for decades on end. How, if at all, does this crisis come to an end?
You sit back and watch the rain fall outside your window. It is a grey day, with the trees shedding their yellow leaves in late autumn. Gloom is in the air, but for those who find poetry in the gathering darkness of autumn there is something of surreal beauty about it all. In the sounds of the rain, you let the mind wander to regions where politics does not anymore arouse in you the enthusiasm which once engineered your views of the world. Nicholas Sarkozy goes to prison on corruption charges. Could this be happening in France? In a land where once the inspirational Charles de Gaulle held sway and the intellectual Francois Mitterrand injected confidence in people, politics has declined to banality.
You recall the old days when in the White House lived presidents who truly possessed the presidential qualities which enriched politics in America. As you age, you let the mind travel back to Kennedy, Johnson, Nixon, Carter, Reagan, Clinton, and Obama. The heart sinks when today you observe a different administration, almost on the pattern of the Third World, operate in Washington. You who have grown accustomed to seeing American Presidents respect their predecessors are shocked when the current occupant of the White House freely dispenses invectives about those who preceded him in the exercise of power.
The war between Russia and Ukraine goes on. Talk of Tomahawk missiles for Zelenskyy is horrifying and you pray that such a disaster does not take place. Meanwhile, all those drones keep raining down fire on cities and towns in Russia and Ukraine. As you grieve over the loss of life and property in the two countries, you travel back to the times when there was a country called the Soviet Union. You miss it, for as long as it was around, the world was held together, was prevented from collapsing into chaos, through what was called a balance of power.
The rains go on beating against the window. The day takes on darker hues. You are not willing anymore to dwell on misery and so you go into reading up on the latest winner of the Nobel Prize for Literature. Laszlo Krasznahorkai is an author you have not read, which is when you invite yourself to go looking for his works at the bookshops around you. But that search can wait for some time, for you have before you a work by the 2021 winner of the prize, Abdulrazak Gurnah. As you turn the pages, an interruption bores its way into the mind. Jean-Paul Sartre takes hold of the imagination. He declined the Nobel in 1964.
Only the great men and women among us can resist temptation. Leo Tolstoy in his time did not wish his name to be put up for the Nobel and suggested that someone else be given the honour. About the Nobel for Peace, there is the boldness of Le Duc Tho we recall. He refused to accept the prize even as Henry Kissinger seized it. How many of us are who possess the courage of Sartre, Tolstoy, and Tho? In our times, courage is fast being replaced by audacity. And when audacity takes over, it is civilised life which takes a mauling.
Civilization is at risk from dark forces increasingly gaining the upper hand. Women do not see light in Taliban-ruled Afghanistan. In Sudan, two generals cheerfully destroy the country in order to gain power in Khartoum. They do not see, or they refuse to see, the pestilence and the misery and the agony and the hunger they have been subjecting their people to. In the Congo, unhappiness thrives.
These are not happy times. We live in an era when good men are hunted by bad men unable or unwilling to come to terms with aesthetics, with the charm associated with life lived in tune with the ideals underscored by faith.
You watch the rains; you relish their sounds. You age with every passing second. And yet you step out of your seventies, for a while, and go looking for the joys you experienced in your teenage years. In a debilitating present, the illusion of returning to lost times recreates, even if briefly, some of the old spark in life.
Syed Badrul Ahsan is an author and writes on politics and foreign affairs.
