Talking Shop: Time for some sense

“Come away, O human child! To

the waters and the wild with a

faery, hand in hand. For the

world is more full of weeping

than you can ever understand.”

―William Butler Yeats

Much as parents relive their childhood for a second time through the lives and eyes of their children, I too rekindle my younger years through the antics and shenanigans of my cats and dog. For me, they are as precious and celebratory as any human child, with all respect to lovey-dovey parents. Sure, one of the deep-seated reasons for my palpable affection for my ‘children’ is that they are a spitting image of what I was at their age—naughty, incorrigible, impossible and shameless vagabonds. Yes, very loveable I was. And they can the future too.

This is not ribald, that animals can predict the future—hell, they are even being used in many countries with advanced healthcare practices to pre-detect ailments such as malignant cancers and Alzheimer’s disease. As for us two-legged kind, there have been many who predicted that while youth was great, tomorrow would bring trouble and anguish for the world. Decades on, their predictions are coming true. Most were eloquent in their strophe, but it is what they said about the future that was the real knee-jerker and eye-opener. Said one: “I agree that the life of youth is strange, for the rise of aspiration, effort and knowledge is captivating. Here’s the trouble, that the world has become and will continue to be a war zone. Life will become a burden due to worries.”

They were right about the future, but how did these people know? It was perhaps because the hallowed possess the rare ability to suss out the essence of life and visualize the future by intrinsically relating to and reflecting in the cantos that today, the ‘present’, is offering and what it bodes for tomorrow. Dogs and cats are also blessed with a sixth sense that often detects trouble before it arrives. We just have to look around and many of yesteryears’ observations are ringing the cacophonic burr of a whistle in our ears, with eyes misting over and the mind wondering how things have come to this pass. I am not speaking of the disinclination of a few towards the future, for I can even see it deep in the eyes of my pets.

Not just in cinema halls

This column is in no way an obeisance to fantasy, only a cut-and-dry delineator of things that have transpired and similar instances that could juxtapose our expectations of the future. Lest you guffaw or stifle a yawn, let me mention a few events that were predicted by people before they happened. For instance, scientist Nikola Tesla, in 1909, foresaw the invention of Wi-Fi and mobile phones. “It’ll be possible to transmit wireless messages all over the world; so simply that any individual can own and operate his own apparatus,” he said, instantly greeted by smirks and simpering. Mark Twain predicted his own death, down to the day. The Huckleberry Finn author was quoted as saying he would “go out with the Halley’s Comet when it reappears”. On 21 April 1910, a day after the famous comet reappeared, Twain passed away from a heart attack.

There’s more. French General Ferdinand Foch, who served as the Supreme Allied Commander during World War I, proclaimed at the signing of the Treaty of Versailles: “This is not peace. It is an armistice for 20 years.” Exactly 20 years later, German aggression kickstarted World War II. Robert Boyle, heralded as one of the founders of modern science, said in the 1660s that human organ transplants would happen: “There will be cure of diseases at a distance or by transplantation.” There were jeers in the crowd; in 1954, 300 years after Boyle’s prediction, the first human transplant happened.

The crux is different

I could go on—to Jules Verne, the French novelist who penned From the Earth to the Moon in 1865. Over a century later, Verne’s story was not just proven true but hailed for its astonishing accuracy. There were others like serial-predictor Nostradamus, American engineer John Elfreth Watkins and French philosopher Alexis de Tocqueville, who all foresaw things. We have also had Subhadra Kumari Chauhan, the Hindi poet who wrote in 1946, in her classic Mera Naya Bachpan, that abounding troubles and burdens were coming. Sadly, her words are ringing true.

Look around yourself and you see a world falling apart, and the worst part is that all of this could and should have been avoided. If we talk about the Hamas-Israel imbroglio, it has gone on for over 40 days with no truce in sight and bombarded hospitals are shutting down after civilians (including children) were killed, medical equipment became non-existent and doctors themselves went to their maker. The weekend saw militants from Gaza Strip stunning Israelis, bypassing one of the world’s most advanced security systems and begin a pounding that left 900 dead. Israel also struck Gaza with airstrikes, killing 680 people. This could have been avoided.

Closer home, in Myanmar, a civil war rages, with armed groups fighting the military junta which deposed the elected Government. In all 11 people, including eight children, have been killed in Chin State after a military jet bombed a school in the remote village of Vuilu. This could have been avoided. Elsewhere, the Russia-Ukraine standoff has reached a dead-end; so much so that both states, as also the United States, are scratching their heads on the next steps, since any dramatic resolution is clearly not on the cards. This could and should have been avoided too.

So where is this headed?

We have already proven that canines and felines can see the future, as can human beings. Jokes apart, there’s no time for flippancy as things are coming to a disagreeable head. As a race and a species, we need to take immediate cognizance of what we know, what is coming our way, what repercussions these events will have on the present and the future, and the corrective actions to be taken to stem the festering rot. If we don’t, religious chasms worldwide will widen, gun- and rocket-makers will continue to laugh their way to the bank, agenda-driven politicians and self-proclaimed autocrats will get closer to becoming megalomaniacs, cases of mob violence and lynching will escalate, and our ‘bullet’ trains will run as much on the tracks as they will off them.

As I said earlier, the hallowed possess the ability to suss out the essence of today and visualize the future. Mankind hasn’t lost out on that ability as of now; in fact, I am sure evolution has only made the foresight stronger. Global leaders know which way the wind is blowing—anyway, we do know for a fact that it is mostly leaders who are making the tempests happen; even less-endowed people like us can foresee that part. What is critical is what these tempests bring in in their wake. If we continue to ignore the obvious of tomorrow for the sake of an affable and self-gregarious today, we are playing with a fire that will consume not just the ordinary, but also those who lit the first match that led to the final conflagration.

Remember Adolf Hitler? For all his bluster and the might of the Third Reich, he tied the nuptial knot with Eva Braun in a bunker, poisoned his new wife the very next day and then shot himself with a 7.65-mm Walther. Today’s leaders need to read the signs and act, so that such action doesn’t end up with them putting a pistol in their mouth, with their finger on an itchy trigger.

The writer is a veteran journalist and communications specialist. He can be reached on narayanrajeev2006@gmail.com. Views expressed are personal