Five impossible wishes for 2022

It’s time for magical thinking again, when we make heartfelt wishes and pray that, against all odds, they will somehow come true. I have five for India

It’s time to make wishes again. This time, we are in pain. A microscopic predator has had us scurrying and scrambling for two years now, even as it gears up for yet another assault. But wishing the Coronavirus gone is not on my list for 2022; science tells me that, like viruses before it, it will go by itself sooner or later. 

Long before the virus, the moral life of our country has been in free fall. When a nation forgets what really matters and lets itself be led and pushed into an alternate reality, then it is time for magical thinking again. As the year peters out, I have five impossible wishes for my country.

I wish we will rediscover that money is not meaning. Like the West, India is now a country where acquiring money is a goal by itself. While the pandemic disrupted the lives and livelihoods of 35 million Indians, the Sensex rose steadily, up 75 per cent from 2020. The number of Indian billionaires went up from 102 to 140. The three richest Indians have R100 billion between them. At the height of the pandemic, Mr Ambani earned 72,000,000 times more in an hour than the average Indian cremating a parent in a car park.

I wish that in 2022, we re-learn that net worth is not the same as net worthiness. The richest people I know are not the most human or humane people I know. Their money has no value because it makes no difference in the lives of others. Like love, the only way to have money is to give it away.

I wish we learn to separate fable from fact. Over the last few years, many Indians have come to believe that we are somehow anointed, somehow made special by an act of god, particularly those who are Hindus. We have been told, and we have told our children, that everything the world enjoys today was somehow conceived and created first in Vedic India, from plastic surgery to nuclear energy.

There was a time when the sane response to this would have been, “Then how come we’re in such a sorry state now?” But as a nation we no longer poke and prod the things we are told, to judge for ourselves what is true and what not. We have replaced our thinkers with ideologues and our doubts with certainties. 

But no matter what our rulers boasted, we did not save the world from COVID by gifting it a vaccine. Nor did we save ourselves. We were laid low and revealed to be as naked and vulnerable as every other arrogant country on the planet. We finally got rid of COVID just by not counting the numbers.

In 2022, I pray that we learn to ask better questions and keep asking them till we get illuminating answers that help us see truth rather than shifting shadows.

I wish that we once again cherish discourse over opinion. Netflix’s savage satire, Don’t Look Up, opens a window into who we are today, in India and the planet—a suicidal, gullible, muddle-headed species obsessed with our Instagram images, Facebook likes and pet controversies. If a planet-killer comet was heading earthwards, date of impact known, half of us would argue with the other half about whether it was a left-wing conspiracy. Rich corporations would go nuts trying to monetise extinction and Jeff Bezos would announce his plans for transporting selected elite humans to an earth-like planet in the galaxy’s Goldilocks zone.

But Indians were once deep thinkers who valued discourse, debate and argument, the very things that make a civilization invincible and great. We are now muffled voices, living in fear of tax raids and midnight arrests, daring not to criticise lest it paint a target on our backs.

Let 2022 become the year when we re-discover that amazing super-power we once possessed, called clear thinking.

I wish that we learn to separate spectacle from substance. We’ve eaten a steady diet of sensation for so long that today, like frenzied crowds at a Roman arena, all we want is blood spilt. We want Arnab Goswami to be rude, unreasonable, obscene and vicious as he tears into his victims. We are awed and distracted by the 182-metre high statue of Sardar Vallabhbhai Patel on a hillock in Gujarat but we forget what he stood for—integrity and character in governance, business and personal life. I pray we heed him once again in 2020.

Finally, I pray that we remember that we survive by holding hands. Human beings have rather simple needs—kindness, cooperation, empathy, altruism, civility and decency. No matter how high our GDP and Sensex, we will be ourselves once again only when we reconnect with this simple truth. I hope that happens in 2022.

Here, viewed from there. C Y Gopinath, in Bangkok, throws unique light and shadows on Mumbai, the city that raised him. You can reach him at [email protected]

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The views expressed in this column are the individual’s and don’t represent those of the paper

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