A year has passed by, and not much that happened has been pleasant or worth reminiscing. History may probably look at 2014 as the year when everything went overboard. A war began in Gaza and ended a bit too late. But our social media wars took over more people’s lives than some dying in a strip of land, all because they got there first. 2,100 Palestinians and 71 Israelis died.
We got a new Government in the middle of the hottest Indian summer. Everything will change, they said, as if we had any choice in the matter. A person’s cleavage became a talking point because another person didn’t know when to stop talking about it.
The world didn’t get any better for women. About 300 girls were kidnapped in Nigeria because they had the gall to go to school, while Malala Yousufzai received the Nobel Peace Prize for committing the same crime, proving that no prize will make a difference. Two women were found hanging in a village because they didn’t have a toilet inside their home. Another woman was raped when she took a cab. That didn’t stop a Member of Parliament from threatening to rape women who ‘belonged’ to men from the Opposition.
The right rose like it’s nobody’s business. Nobody wanted to make it their business for fear of courting the displeasure of the powers that be. Vegetarian food was connected to sharp minds in engineering schools, we were informed. Non-vegetarian food, we learnt, will make us want to marry outside the community. People who were earlier dismissed as fringe elements of the ruling party, entered the mainstream, became ministers and said things even your casteist uncle wouldn’t say in comfortable surroundings.
Keeping our streets clean became a priority, because until someone gave it a fancy name and funded it with taxpayer’s money, we didn’t know the benefits of cleanliness. Celebrities posed with brooms, daintily picking up litter, aided by others, a job millions do everyday for bad pay.
Brazil held a World Cup as it faced protests by young citizens over price rise and corruption, while, we in India fondly remembered our most recent brush with the Commonwealth Games and took solace in the fact that politicians aren’t very different across the world.
Two Malaysia Airlines flights crashed, and for the first one, everyone on your twitter feed became an aviation expert and came up with fascinating theories as to what might have happened, the most interesting one being that the passengers ended up on the island from Lost .
A group of men who decided to interpret their religion in the worst way possible entered a school in Pakistan and killed 145 people, including 132 children. We chose to blame it on the religion and not the man holding the gun.
Godse became a hero, a man who could be reinterpreted according to where you fell on the political spectrum, if you could just ignore that he shot and killed another man. Christmas became Good Governance Day, in a country known for its bureaucratic hurdles. An already meaningless civilian award was announced and we still expected it to be relevant.
Assam faced riots again, with about 70 Adivasis killed by militants but nobody cared because it is the Northeast. It has been an awful year. Thank you for making us a part of it.
