I know it has been quite a bit since my last blog on Food For
Thought, so I would like to borrow from Glenn Frey of the Eagles when they were
performing live after a 14 year hiatus. I didn’t break the blog, I just took a
four month vacation!
Well coming back to the topic on hand, I would not be
entirely wrong if I assume that the first thought which comes to people’s mind
when they see the word Apocalypse would be that of the end of the world. Truly
so, with the lamentable events that we see in the news every day. The incidents
span from your back alley across to all the continents on the planet except
maybe Antarctica, probably because an average temperature of -50⁰C is too cold
for even evil and negativity to pop its head. It has reached a stage where we
are not sure where we will be safe. Europe as a favoured tourist destination
has become a hot bed for radical elements and laid back destinations are also
seeing an up-rise of terror like what we witnessed in Brussels and Nice a few
months ago. The violence has stepped beyond the geographical and religious
barriers as we see the deluge of refugees moving out of the Middle-East. In
addition to having a social and emotional impact, the above also has economical
impact because countries are forced to increase spent on security which seems
to be ever elusive these days. This in turn is capitalized and exploited upon
by defense contractors, security agencies and such. Billions of dollars are
spent on preparation of an inevitable attack and people live in constant fear.
If we step back and observe, we will realize that such
incidents are happening with an alarming increase in propensity,
notwithstanding the fact that media has definitely become more active over the
past decade. As for what anybody gains from such gruesome acts of violence,
even those propagating them don’t know. Will all this peak up to a destruction
of the world? It is anybody’s guess.
With the advent of the digital age, everything is a binary
digit in the internet ether, whether it is our entire personal information or our
bank balance. This is a boon and a curse. Boon because everything and everybody
is interconnected and readily available such that we can contact anybody
anywhere in the world with the click of a button and also accomplish anything
at the same speed. Curse because everything we are, including personal
information, eating patterns, darkest secrets all seem to be readily available
to any discerning stalker. As for the bank account, one hack and all that money
flows to somebody else’s account in the Turk and Caicos Islands. Further, if
you note carefully, everybody has an opinion about everything on the social
media because trolls on even life threatening issues come out faster than a
soda through a vending machine. We are so hooked up to our smart-phones and
iPads that we could do without a kidney but not without these gadgets. What if
something causes a shutdown of this digital ether? Apocalyptic?
Taking a slight detour, let us look at an indirect effort by
man to bring forward the date of the apocalypse. Other than the tendency to
destroy each other as discussed in the second paragraph above, the human race also
somehow seems to have an animosity towards nature. The very nature that gives
life to us and nurtures us. With indiscriminate urbanization, excessive
pollution, chemical effluents, deforestation, unplanned industrialization we
have managed to wear down the earth far beyond what she deserves. Well the
fallacy of man is to assume that he has control over nature and not the other way
around. Nature is like a tensile spring which will coil under the pressure man
puts on it, but will finally spring back to its original form. When that
happens on a global scale, it is bound to be cataclysmic for the comparably minuscule human race. Imagine a mega earthquake which shakes the very core of the earth!
Apocalyptic?
Where does this word Apocalypse come from? It is Greek and
has that chic phonetic attraction to it like all old Greek words. But the
interesting part is in Greek, Apocalypse does not mean end of the world. It
simply translates to disclosure of knowledge or lifting of a veil. So when we
interpret Apocalypse through Greek spectacles it can also mean the end of the
world “as we know it now”. Well that takes a positive turn, doesn’t it? If
every human on the face of the planet decides to make a change in the current
course of things, stop violence and care for each other, protect privacy and
integrity in spite of developing technology and care for nature so that it does
not have to retaliate to protect itself, we would end the world as we know it
today and build a better one.
Therefore, an Apocalypse need not necessarily be a mega
earthquake that eats the whole human race up. It can very well mean little
quakes in each of us and a shake-up of our thought processes so that we can coexist
with each other and nature in a better way!
