The present tends to bully us into accepting its unquestioned continuation. From time to time it’s a good idea to fight one’s way out of this trap with counter-intuitive imagination. So, no matter how ridiculous it may sound, one should try and imagine a totally different future, different outcomes from those signposted by current reality. As an exercise let’s take a few things at random and examine the possibilities.
Cars and fossil-driven vehicles in general: imagine a future where people have lost their lust for driving a speeding (or crawling) clump of metal and plastic. Imagine a time when private cars are rare and uncool, relegated to the list of human habits of the past that are now absurd. Imagine that the section of the human brain that gets its kicks from speed now has some other, far more sustainable, means by which to reach those highs. Imagine that the little bubble world of privacy and the illusion of ‘control’ and ‘choice’ that the motor-car gave you in the 20th and early 21st centuries is now seen for the environmentally costly folly it was.
Simultaneously imagine that decent public transport (driven by some sustainable fuel) is as common across India as electricity is today.
Imagine cities where you can walk while breathing clean air; imagine high connectivity between villages and towns and cities that precludes the need for people to cluster around huge urban agglomerations.
With everyone from car companies and oil giants to governments drug-pushing the dreams of faster cars, wider highways and ‘smart’(er) cities all this is difficult to imagine; but if we don’t, the reality that awaits us and the generations immediately following is of long trails of stalled cars, of the already critical environmental devastation multiplied many times, of increased violence that will come from the scarcity of everything from petrol to parking spaces.
Shrunk cities
The city and the countryside: try and picture a future where India’s cities have actually shrunk.
The chief reason for this would be that the quality of life in our villages has become immeasurably better, that young people can see hope and happiness in living in the countryside and not in some crowded urban slum of whichever economic strata. Just as the idea of having one’s own car becomes unattractive so does the idea of ‘making it big’ in a big city become deeply unsexy.
Great connectivity and very different economic and environmental models would mean that the quotient of hope and happiness in living away from large urban sprawls increases massively.
Is this idea too fantastical? Well, maybe, but the alternative is that we continue to criminally neglect our countryside, to treat it simultaneously merely as a supply chamber for our urban food needs and a service-latrine for the multi-level excretions of our cities. Think then of the unrest both rural and in the overcrowded metro-miasmas, think of our nourishment and our garbage co-mingling to the point where we can no longer tell the difference, think of the millions of damaged angry human beings, in city, town and village.
Imminent change
Borders and armies. Say this to yourself: in order to survive we are going to have to shrink our army and make our borders more porous. Say this also: the shrinking of the army and the opening up of the borders is going to happen not a hundred or two hundred years from now but in the lifetimes of many of us alive today.
Pseudo-patriotic myopia
And, when this happens, the millions who benefit from it will laugh at the generations in power currently, and the ones who could have benefited earlier will curse our current pseudo-patriotic short-sightedness. We can no longer divert the funds we need to put into healthcare, into education, into our rural areas and to protect our environment to prop up a huge military sector.
Should China ever find itself in the mood and position to turn its full military attentions towards us, we would not be able to keep it from its objectives for more than two weeks. By the end of that fortnight our military will be heavily, irreversibly, damaged and depleted. It’s not about courage, it’s about ordinance, and the Chinese simply have lots more of it. On the other hand, even the craziest Pakistani generals, the ones snorting the worst jihad-powder know that if they go into a one-on-one war with India that will mean the end of Pakistan and, more importantly, the end of the vast business empire called Pak Army Inc.
Border crisis
On the other hand, where all these countries, us centrally included, will actually be ambushed is from the environment. Over the next 20 years or so, rising sea levels around the Sunderbans and erratic behaviour from the long-tortured Pakistani rivers will create a refugee situation on our borders that no tank corps or Rafale squadron will be able to handle. Better to release some valves now, have some movement of populations, some serious exchange of goods and businesses so that when things get critical we have some early say in helping control the inevitable calamities and protect ourselves from a tsunami of refugees.
Am I talking through my hat? Have I been drinking too much? Perhaps, perhaps not. Talking about drinking, let me end with another possibly lunatically counter-intuitive idea. In order to control India’s alcohol problem we need less and not more prohibition. More and more of the country’s younger generations are going to want to drink, get high, dance and celebrate. The question is what kind of drinking culture we create to replace the current, horrible, male-dominated drunken culture. There needs to be a shift in perception away from the notion that all drinking is bad.
Crackdown on hooch
What is bad is alcoholism, the idea of drinking to get drunk in the shortest time, that getting drunk is what real men do. The powers that be, and they come from all sorts of political parties, urgently need to do a few basic, difficult things: lift prohibition and reduce the price on lighter alcoholic beverages such as beer, wine and low-alcohol local brews. At the same time they need to crackdown more effectively on hooch and illegal and dangerous distilling (which they are trying to do anyway, in both prohibition and non-prohibition States). Also at the same time they need to crack down on behaviour that stems from drunkenness.
Simultaneously, there is a need to create safe spaces, bars, clubs, eateries where decent, cheap alcohol can be served to both men and women. We need to break this vicious binary that accepts that the well-to-do will drink overpriced foreign-style liquor whereas the poor will either go dry or poison themselves with battery acid. Mad? Impractical? Maybe. Next time I might try and suggest how we should allow the consumption of all sorts of meat to counter the increasing non-vegetarianism in the country.
The columnist and filmmaker is author of The Last Jet-Engine Laugh and Poriborton: An Election Diary. He edited Electric Feather: The Tranquebar Book of Erotic Stories and was featured in Granta.
