This appeared first on LinkedIn.
When all the water around us is brackish and toxic, when all the air is full of poison and impossible to inhale, when the food we eat tastes like fertiliser while offering no nutrition, when all our medicines stop working, when there are no bees, no birds, and no insects left to pollinate our plants or digest our waste, and when the land burns, our blood boils, & skin singes during the summers, we shall have:
- one part of our population boasting how they increased shareholder value by using a solutions-based approach to identify value-added cashflow enhancements as they built momentum by outpacing the competition and moving up & down the value chain and maximised earnings by using arbitrage and tax structuring to optimise wealth creation;
- one part of our population proud of wresting the Indic past of our revered ancestors and their traditional knowledge to correct history, unify our customs, languages, cuisines, and costumes to be one with the pure race, and reclaiming science by mining our mythology for truth and going back to our roots when all was unadulterated, holy, and whole;
- one part of our population gloating about how they checkmated the opposition by using using the same fraudulent means they used to once, buying off all the media, shouting down contrarians, unilaterally annexing territory and reneging on promises, whether on the currency or in the constitution, reduced incumbents and their supporters to snivelling infants as their toys were taken away, locking up everyone who disagreed, and abusing & threatening anyone whom we didn’t like the looks of;
- one part of the population condescendingly sniggering in a self-satisfied way about how they articulated uncounterable arguments with unbeatable rhetorical flourish and sarcasm using complicated English and speaking down to others while virtue signalling to browbeat the other side, mocking them with memes and candle-lit marches (or at least threats of such marches), as they sipped on their vodka-tonics and single malts while ruing the days when more “reasonable” men had power;
- one part of the population screaming frustratingly into the wind talking of revolutions and hanging the rich, promising retribution for thousands of years of oppression, raging against the system with increasingly impotent anger, threatening to take over the means of production and all land (useless as it may be by then), egged on and led by the wealthy, privileged people sitting comfortably many thousands of miles away in their plush living rooms, as they post about ‘subaltern history’ and social justice on Facebook, when they are not posting pictures of their latest holiday in the south of France, or their pet parrot’s birthday on Instagram;
- one (very large) part of the population dead; and
- one (even larger) part of the population wishing they were, and that death would come quickly as the pain became unbearable.
Which part would you belong to? And your children?
Welcome to the future. Remember that Greta Thunberg is not the message. Attacking her, regardless of how righteous you are, is irrelevant and in the long run, completely useless. She is a messenger. By going for her, we are tilting at windmills. We are laughing at the person who is telling us that we are cutting the very branch we sit on…because she is just a weird-looking kid with an unpronounceable mental condition speaking in broken English, trying to sell us an impossible dream. The truth is that it does not matter who is she or how she speaks. What she says is the only thing we need to pay attention to.
Trust me, the Earth will survive. The Earth has seen at least five mass extinctions in its history, with the last one, 250 million years ago, extinguishing 70% of all land species and 96% of all marine life. The Earth continued to spin and revolve around the Sun, as it will for the next 5 billion years, approximately. It is the human species we must worry about. We cannot survive another 2 degrees Celsius rise in temperature. That is all it takes to kill us. To finish the so-called dominant species, the most intelligent beings to walk this Earth. We are that delicate. To act now is to act in self-preservation, in self-defence. We are NOT saving the Earth in an altruistic and noble act. We are saving our own collective asses.
There is a popular saying in Hindi that says, “सर सलामत तो पगड़ी हज़ार” meaning that if you save your head, you can always find a thousand hats. Do not focus on the hats. There is plenty of time for that. Let us focus on keeping our heads about us and using these heads to take sane decisions if we want to wear any hats at all in the future.
