Time Is The Plague, Space The Healer

I am a story teller and I start this with enormous fear. The subject of thisstory may not be there when it's being read by many. And that's the very reason,I have to narrate the story.

For centuries they have gazed benevolently from their mountain homes as warsraged across the Afghan plains. But now the two massive Buddha statues couldthemselves become casualties. The statues, carved into the sides of themountains bordering the central province of Bamiyan during the second and thirdcenturies, are under fire from Islamic Taliban movement. Frescoes on the wallssurrounding the statues, as well as grottoes dug in the fifth and sixthcenturies by Buddhist monks, have all but disappeared through neglect. It is notjust their size which makes the statues unique. Both are dressed in togas of aGrecian style imported into India by the soldiers of Alexander the Great when heinvaded the region in 334-327 B.C. Inspired by one invader, they now faceanother -- the Taliban.

The biggest tragedy in the last one hundred years- the Holocaust- is apointer to understand the perils of the temporal axis. In his monumental workHitler's Willing Executioners, Daniel Jonah Goldhagen establishes that Holocaustwas made possible not just by Hitler and his Nazi team but through the willfulsupport and enthusiastic energy of ten of thousands of ordinary Germans. Rightfrom the days of Christianity's consolidation of its hold over the Roman Empire,he argues that, its leaders preached against Jews. The theological needimpelling Christians to differentiate themselves from the bearers of thereligion from which their own had broken off, was born anew with eachgeneration.

The temporal axis comes from the idea of shared heritage. Christiansconceived of their religion as superseding Judaism. Therefore Jews as Jews oughtto disappear from the earth. They ought to become Christians. But Jews would notand this meant that Jews and Christians shared a common heritage- the mostimportant part of which was the Jewish Bible with its God inspired words- towhich Christians and Jews gave conflicting interpretations. Unable to accept thefact that the text can mean two different things to two different sections, itwas reduced to a contested terrain. If Jews were right, then Christians werewrong. Another temporal residue that accentuates the Christian hostility towardsJews is the belief that Jews were the killers of Christ. It's not just  theJews of Jesus' time responsible for Jesus' death but Jews for all time becausethe contemporary Jews also reject the idea of Jesus as messiah and hence, bycontinuance implicate themselves in the historical crime.

I am tempted to conclude that the burden of the scriptural history, thetemporal axis, was over with the horrors of the holocaust and the emergence ofpolitically correct narratives. Even as I write this sentence I know that itwould be grave to arrive at such conclusions. After fighting with a faith thatpreceded them, now it seems the Christians are fighting a faith that succeededthem- Islam. Islam has all the traits of Judaism. It shares the same heritage.It shares the same spatio-temporal trajectory. And it is still the most obviousother. Today Islam is equated with barbarism, dictatorship, misogynism,medivealism and anti-progress. (Isn't progress the most preferred son oftemporality?) What actually confounds the case is that now the earlierdescendants of the same heritage- Jews and Christians- in the form of Israel andthe West- have buried their differences only to launch a new joint crusadeagainst the later offspring of their heritage-Islam.

But such a temporal belief boomerangs very badly. Some of the Jews who fledGermany fearing Nazi persecution were instrumental in the theory underpinningthe development of atomic weapons. The expelled Jews forced the pace andorchestrated the production of mass destruction. The key figures of this momentof defining human history were Oppenheimar, a descendant of German speaking Jewsfrom Prague and Albert Einstein, that great wandering Jew who discovered thetheory of relativity. The unrelenting destruction of the Holocaust fueled theultimate destructivity. If the hunting down of the Jews gave birth to Atomicweapons, the ruthless demonisation of Islam has produced  biologicalweapons and chemical weapons. The major problem with the temporal belief is thatit takes a singular trajectory. Has it ever been possible for the millions andmillions of people to look at Time as Times where every moment representeddifferent notions and ideas to different people?

Let me elaborate this idea. Until, recently the main centres of Jewishpopulation and religious culture lay in the countries ruled by Muslims. Most ofthe Jews belonged to the main stream of Jewish life. They accepted the authorityof the Talmud, the body of interpretation and discussion of Jewish law. Talmudwas not collected and compiled in Tel Aviv or in Jerusalem but in Iraq.

How did such a fairy tale-like brotherhood turn into the present bloodyconfrontation? Every region of the Arab world, has its own story of how theirdream turned into nightmare. There are endless nuances and variations. But, theonly linking aspect is its unmistakable temporal element. While much is saidabout how Christianity has been wiped out of Middle East, the fact remains thatthe Christians are a very confident lot in Syria. In fact, Aramic, the languageof Jesus Christ is spoken only in a  handful of towns in Syria likeQamishli which lies in the Turkey-Syria border. Am I sounding like anunadultereted Islamic apologist? Read the first story to get your impressionright.

In today's world, people have been refugees in most of the places waiting forsome country to accept them. Their life is unreal, a waiting withoutexpectation. Rwanda and Somalia; North Eastern Sri Lanka and Afghanistan, EastTimor and El Salvador, Mynmar and Kampuchea. But fifty years ago it would havebeen Rome and Berlin; Tokyo and Athens; London and Paris. Ill-fate moves both inthe time axis and the space axis. However, what time cannot provide at a givenmoment space can provide- space to live. While most of the history books talksabout the greed to capture land and the ever present expansionist urge of thenation-states, my own doubt is that the desire is not a spatial expansion but atemporal one where the spatial expansion can be the means for that end.

All the stories I have told so far relate to the sectarian violence and thethree major religions Judaism, Christianity and Islam, are as venal as the otherthough they ostensibly meant to propagate love and brotherhood. Looking at thedefiled Buddha face, splashed in 8 column colour, a sense of betrayal runsthrough my veins. My anger is not just towards Taliban militiamen but towardsevery segment of humanity which believes in restoring the 'historic glory' ofthat particular segment. How can I tell the segment that there is nothing calleda "golden era" and every moment in history has its own skewedness andmisanthropic aspects? How can I explain that one cannot selectively recovercertain elements of the past without critiquing the past for its innumerablefollies and at the same time identifying the elements of traditional wisdom? Howdoes one explain  to the Jews that they cannot do to Palestine what theGermans did to them? How does one make the Western intelligentsia understandthat bigotry is not the exclusive preserve of Islamic fundamentalists but ascourge that inflicts all the religions and faiths and to draw to theirattention the bloody war between the Catholics and the Protestants that is goingon in Ireland?

How can I tell the Hindu bigots in my country who righteouslywrite letters to the editors condemning the Taliban that the very heinous act ofdemolishing the Babri Mosque in Ayodhya by the Hindu fanatics was the precursorfor the Taliban to learn methods for demolishing a site of great heritage? Howcan I tell the Buddhist monks of Sri Lanka, who provide the ideological impetusfor the state-sponsored violence against the Tamils, that the fate of Buddha atBamyian in Afghanistan is no different from the numerous Hindu temples in Northand East of Sri Lanka which were desecrated by the holy forces of Buddhism? Howcan I tell the minority Hindu Tamils in Sri Lanka, who are the victims ofSinhala- Buddhism majority not to inflict violence on the Tamil Muslims, who areminorities among the minorities?

If we go through the stories narrated here and then the questions posed itseems that humanity learns nothing from history. History repeated itself asfarce, as tragedy, as comedy and even as tragic-comedy. And it has made itselfclear that it will keep repeating itself. Here the key issue is that history isthe problem of history. Time Immemorial. Eternity. Infinite. The host ofpre-eras. The host of post-eras. The retinue of neo-eras. If I say stone age,then there comes the pre-stone age. Ice-age has pre-Ice age. Colonialism haspost-colonialism. Modernism has a younger brother Post modernism. The strangething is that even a concept like medievalism which is neatly sandwiched betweenancient and modern, has a recurring cousin called neo-medievalism ( a term usedby the western academia to explain the warlords in Africa today). While some ofthe faiths talk about rebirths, others have after-life in heaven or in hell.Time refuses to set its own boundaries fueling the imagination-however grotesqueit might be- to create an ideal, exclusive place for any chosen identity. Theidentity can be linguistic, religious, communal, regional or even continental.

What will happen if you shift this Time axis to the Space axis? Isn't spacetoo infinite? What about all those galaxies and distant stars? What about thatwonderful unit of measurement called light year? Isn't space too boundary-less?Can you be sure where the Milkyway actually ends and our neighbouring galaxystarts? I know that these and many other similar questions will be posed themoment I say that we should look at the axis of Space rather than Time.

Space might be infinite; but the space available for living is finite. Thespecies on this earth cannot live anywhere else. And even within the earth thespace available for each species is species-specific. Obviously monkeys cannot live in sea and fish on land. Earth is not an inheritance of just humanity but of all living beings. Now the space available becomes not only finite but also limited. It's not just history which is temporal. The idea of economic growth is also temporal. We measure growth using words like GDP, GNP, turnovers, budget allocations, spendings, earnings in terms of time. These figures are computed on an hourly or daily or weekly or monthly or annual basis. Every year has another year; a bad year may follow or succeed a good year. And if growth stops, the metabolism of modern economics ceases to exist.

Jean Baudrillard describes the mystique of GNP as a collective bluff on the part of modern societies and he provides a bizarre example to prove it. "The 30 per cent reduction in the luminosity of air in Paris over the past 50 years is regarded as external and non-existent by the accountants. But it results in a greater expenditure of electrical energy, of light bulbs and spectacles, then it exists- and exists, moreover, as an increase in production and social wealth." Just as medieval society was balanced on God and the Devil, according to Baudrillard, ours is balanced on consumption and its denunciation. He said: "Our magic is white. No heresy is possible any longer in a state of affluence". But, for a person like me from a society that is not affluent, the bleakness of this white magic is apparent. We know that the space is limited; so are the resources. We know that the earth is a common inheritance and every section of humanity as well as all other living beings have inalienable right to dwell on her and also the duty to know that she cannot withstand this notion of growth. She already moans at temporalising of her wonderful space.' It's very far and it takes six hours' is the sentence that has replaced 'it's very far and it's thirty thousand miles'. Surface traveling created a sense of belonging to the space. With that being increasingly replaced by air or underground, only Time axis is seen as the guiding principle. Unless we start seeking answers for the space on which we live on a "Here and Now" basis, theTime will end and the judgment day is not very far.