At some point around July I found myself thinking ‘The future is switched off; 2020 is the year the future was switched off.’ When I said this to friends they agreed, ‘Switched off is correct. Chopped off might be better.’
Across four short months we had all got used to not speaking about the future as if it was tangible. Suddenly phrases like ‘next year’, or ‘next February’ were unsayable. The next anything really, except in the extreme short term, had become an absurd concept, like speaking of unicorns. Another word that kept coming up in my mind was compression — the compression of time, the compression of space, the compression of imagination, all woven through by the tragic stories from people we knew of the terminal compression of breath. On many days one felt like one of those metal plates being pressed upon from both sides in some industrial process — the past inexorably pushing up, the plate which had replaced the future pressing down, as your very sense of self was squeezed thinner and thinner.
Bubble of privilege
It took a while to realise that to be able to have this sense of limb-loss, of existential nullity, was to be in a very lucky position. If you had time to feel all these things, to think about them and analyse them, you were in a bubble of privilege. As December 31 approaches, the picture of this most horrible of years begins to firm up and link with other moments in recent years, showing up causalities that make nonsense of any notion that 2020 was an ‘outlier’, a different coloured blip in a procession of ‘normal’ years.
Take just one strand and follow it: masses of ordinary Indians have now been out in the open — whether street or highway — protesting against this government’s new laws for nearly six of the last 13 months. It took an unprecedented pandemic to bring a pause to the huge movement against the CAA-NRC. Just as the scandalous 2020 farm laws are a part of the same republic-destroying project as the 2019 citizenship amendment bill, these new farmer protests are also part of the same push-back by people against this government.
Unlike in March, the fear of the pandemic hasn’t stopped the protests; people have weighed the dangers of COVID-19 against the dangers of staying quiet as their very livelihoods are led to the legislative slaughterhouse. Much of the motivation for these protests, much of the terminal distrust of this government, was sown much earlier than 2020 or even 2019, it just took time to sprout and show itself above ground.
Take another strand, if you will: in late March, when Narendra Modi pushed the panic button without giving a thought to the majority of poor who make up this nation, millions of people began walking home across the breadth of the country and they kept walking for the next three brutally hot months. When the lockdown was imposed in the mother of all knee-jerk reactions there were only 600 infections in India, almost all of them in two or three cities.
Where we are
Now we have the second worst infection spread in the world, an economy in complete tatters, and a huge mass of people who are unemployed with no hope of that changing any time soon. The series of lockdowns was not used to set up any great medical infrastructure, there was no visible leadership, no work on any war-footing to protect the most vulnerable sections of a poor, populous country such as ours.
And yet, you could argue that for many of India’s labourers in the informal sector the future was switched off not in March 2020 but in November 2016 when the craziness of demonetisation was visited upon the economy. Millions of people didn’t have time to contemplate the future then and they don’t have it now; all they can do is try and secure tomorrow and perhaps a few days after that.
Many previously unimaginable things happened in the world in 2020, and many other tragedies unspooled in India, each one enough to brand a ‘normal’ year by itself: the Amphan cyclone, the incarcerative torture of innocent dissidents, the multiple rapes and murders of women, the continuing clampdown on Kashmir, the ongoing ecological disasters.
Many of these events will bleed into one another to cause new alchemies of upheaval and tragedy.
As this undeniably terrible and mind-boggling year comes to an end, it would be good to keep in mind that 2020 may have brought the end of many things but it’s also the start point of many things, both bad and good, that we can’t yet begin to imagine. At times this year, the future may have looked as though it was switched off, but perhaps it was only the beginning of regular load-shedding.
Ruchir Joshi is a filmmaker and columnist.
