Flight Gone By

.L. Doctorow’s Ragtime is a novel, subsequently made into a film, set in the turn of the last century. The magician Houdini, the finance capitalist J.P. Morgan, the automobile baron who symbolised the height of the industrial revolution—Henry Ford—the anarchist-feminist Emma Goldman, Freud and Jung and a number of lesser luminaries rub shoulders with one another against the background score of Scott Joplin’s ragtime music and the backdrop of rising resentment against racism in the United States. Doctorow effortlessly invokes the stalwarts and major events of the era to evoke a peculiar but masterly blend of fact and fiction. There is the promise of imagination ahead. As Khalil Gibran sang, how could we lose faith in the justice of life, when the dreams of those who sleep upon feathers are not more beautiful than the dreams of those who sleep upon the earth?

Towards the end of that century Eric Hobsbawm gave us a reality check of hopes belied, and despaired for the 21st century because he thought it was spiralling out of the reach of the common man. In his interview-mode analysis of what has gone by and what is to come, published as The New Century, Hobsbawm stopped short of fully endorsing Isaiah Berlin’s verdict that the 20th century was “the most terrible century in western history”, but pointed to an uncertain future where a privileged few nations of the world would barricade themselves in and against the demands and aspirations of the rest of the world; where globalisation and liberalisation served the richest sliver of the human population and became empty catchwords for those outside its pale; and digital technology provided access and information, but no real stakes in power and wealth.

Be that as it may, as the first decade of the 21st century draws to a close, it is tempting to imagine how a new novelist might draw on the major players and events of the last 10 years in an epoch-setting modern counterpart of Doctorow’s Ragtime. It would be a formidable task because the facts of this first decade of the new century are already stranger than fiction. An Osama bin Laden defies the creative imagination and the manner of the strike on the twin towers on 9/11 and all that went into and before it is the stuff of several novels. And all that followed slips into the surreal because it defies basic cause-and-effect sequence or logic. Because bin Laden had disappeared into thin air, Saddam Hussein becomes the alternative scapegoat, and weapons of mass destruction (WMD) the bogey to fix him with. America and allies invade Iraq and, after much killing and destruction, can’t find any hidden WMDs. So they go for the next best thing that’s hidden—Saddam himself. They pull him out of his underground burrow, try him in a kangaroo court and string him up. The rest of the story is about trying desperately to keep the volatile remnants together and, equally desperately, to bail out before the country collapses into civil war.

This master narrative is the axis on which the first decade of the century has spun. As part of the spin, another ridiculous illogic stares the world in the face. Bin Laden becomes synonymous with Islam and Islam becomes synonymous with terrorism—the black plague of this era. We will, we know, have to live with that untruth for a long time to come as religious profiling takes us a few centuries backward. Paradoxically, the religions themselves seem to seek to be profiled by growingly assertive external markers, including the hijab and the purdah.

Other dramatis personae and events vie for attention with this central plot. Bush gives way to Obama, who initially stokes the romance of blackness in power. But with the global economy taking a nose dive, and the American economy being the worst off for it, and by pursuing a domestic economic and foreign war policy which looks like a cosmetic job done on Bush’s, the historic gains of that electoral achievement seem frittered away.

eanwhile, interesting configurations and contestations across the world add to the tension and drama. Countries in Latin America are experimenting with newer forms of socialism and already predicting the end of what had set out to be the American century. In Russia, where socialism is already a faded memory, corrupt oligarchs jail corrupt plutocrats to prevent them from emerging as a political threat. The European Union is an uncomfortable sight of coercive cohabitation in which the partners would rather sue one another for divorce. Israel gets more aggressive as the Palestinian cause becomes passé even among the Arab nations. African states don’t really help in exploding the stereotype of internecine strife of genocidal proportions and corruption eating into the vitals of the system even before the system is in place. Iran and North Korea, we are urged to believe, are the agents of nuclear apocalypse. Pending that atomic obliteration, tsunamis and earthquakes come as sharp, painful spikes along with floods and other nodal events on a dangerous graph of climate change—all taking their toll. Amidst all this, a lonely Aung San Suu Kyi, for long ploughing her lonely furrow in Burma, suddenly bursts upon our moral conscience, much like Mandela earlier.

On the subcontinent, the attack on Mumbai makes 26/11 a grisly sequel to 9/11. The Tamil cause in Sri Lanka, wrested from its self-appointed champion, the Pol Potist LTTE, is put in the vindictive hands of a proto-fascist Sinhala state. China is the bar India must seek to better in its new-found role as one of the world’s emergent economic leaders even as we set our sights on United Nations Security Council membership. Farmers continue to commit suicide with reassuring regularity and social and economic inequity and deprivation provide the static background buzz which tells us the system is alive and ticking.

If a touch of the spy stuff was missing in all this, it takes us by storm towards the end of the decade with WikiLeaks and its unlikely hero, Julian Assange. Unlikely, because a rape rap doesn’t quite sit well on a hero. But the impact of the material he put out in each instalment registered like on the Richter scale. The corridors of power suddenly find themselves exposed to the public realm. As the world leaders run for cover, seek to limit the damage, silence Assange and plug the leak, we suddenly realise that digital information technology can invert the hierarchy and put the governing class at the receiving end.

Our own desi subplot of a leak that shook and displaced the powerful comes as a spicy finish to the decade. Niira Radia and her telephone chats are becoming as much the voyeur’s as the law enforcement agencies’ delight. We hear and see journalists cosying up to corporates, corporates fixing policies, policies acquiring price tags, and politicians looting the exchequer. A rash of scams surfaces and suddenly the political milieu is a minefield across which everyone is stepping warily. A nice note to leave these pompous marauders on, as we bid goodbye to 2010. What a decade! Can any novelist, any fabulist, serve up anything better than it actually was?

The author is the Chairman of Media Development Foundation and Asian College of Journalism