Caveat Lector: I separated from social media a few days ago to cleanse myself and to breathe. I am still on the wagon, so to say, but am here for just this post because I cannot hold it in any longer. It is like a toxin, that if not drained, will envelop and define me. So, while I am posting this, I will not be engaging on the post.
I remember a conversation between my kid brother and me when we were stepping out of the movie theater after having watched Terminator 2 on my birthday (if I am not mistaken) in 1991. He always overestimated my abilities of comprehension as well as explanation, and seemed to labour under the misconception that I could be turned to for learning new concepts and complicated words from. Anyways, to cut a long story short, we discussed ‘dystopia’ and he had an interesting observation to make: “Dystopia, by definition, must always be in the future, bade bhaiyaa. No one will ever confess to be living in one.” I could not think of an example where that wasn’t true.
If he were here today, I could prove him wrong.
In Delhi, at this very moment, there are people dying of asphyxiation on the streets, their relatives begging for oxygen, medicine, and a place to rest, hospitals are full of the almost dead and dying, the obviously paltry number of doctors and nurses are losing their physical as well as mental balance, black marketers are selling life-saving drugs in the shadows at multiple times their prices, old men and women are left to die on the road sides, people formerly powerful are seeing the limits of their perceived power as they or their loved ones are slowly drained of life right in front of their eyes, and as corpses overwhelm the living, funeral pyres are being lit on open roads and spaces, with multiple bodies stacked on each other, while out there, an army of uniformed workers, engineers, and massive earth-moving machines dig a tunnel for the Supreme Leader to travel from his house to his office, even as his ‘office’ area is being renovated as a showcase for his greatness (with an equally grand name of ‘Central Vista’, apt for a place from where all power flows and obtains legitimacy), and elsewhere right there in the same city, under the garish floodlights and empty stadia, 2 teams of 11 each clad in multi-coloured, multi-sponsored clothing play cricket as commentators use canned applause to create ‘atmosphere’ transmitted live across the nation and the world to slack-jawed people sitting in their darkened living rooms (lockdown, you see) staring at the spectacle beamed into their homes, munching on junk food ordered online and delivered by an army of faceless people in red t-shirts. If this is not dystopia, I wonder what is.
