Everybody
has their own version of hell. For those currently being brutalized and
victimized in Gaza or any other active warzone, being starved, tortured, driven
from their homes and watching their children get executed is the final circle
of hell’s many torments. The drunk biker who caused the accident that turned a
double – decker luxury bus into a raging inferno, the travel company who
bypassed guidelines while renovating the vehicle, and the bus driver who got
his heavy vehicle driving license with false certificates all of which cost the
lives of 20 lives in Andhra’s Kurnool tragedy are no doubt deserving of places
in hell’s vaunted torture chambers but the truth is only their victims got a
taste of hell’s agonizing pain and their loved ones are living it. A young
doctor in Maharashtra took her own life blaming sexual assault and the constant
pressure to falsify certificates by a cop and political underlings for her
decision, choosing death over hell.
A casual
scan of the headlines on any given day confirms that life anywhere in the
planet has acquired hellish dimensions. Yet, for the privileged populace who
have mercifully been spared such horrors, the many versions of hell on earth is
just another scary movie that has the ability to make even the most
desensitized feel something akin to terror or sorrow but mostly serves to
entertain and rescue from ennui. For the only thing most truly cannot abide and
will do anything to avert is boredom. The rest neither matters nor merits
getting out of bed, rolling up the sleeves and doing something, anything, to
facilitate change in an increasingly cruel and corrupt world that simply
doesn’t care about countless lives routinely getting ground up in the tragedy
mill via entirely preventable ways.
Yet, make
no mistake, everybody is in some form of hell. Even if for umpteen folks a
hellish ordeal is formulating a suitable email response to an employer’s
performance evaluation questionnaire or Tinder rejection. Or staring unblinkingly
at a phone screen which is pinging with manic glee bringing to compromised
attention, reports about Virat and Rohit’s performance or non – performance and
Instagram reels featuring side boobs while missing the wife’s delivery of the
firstborn. The notifications are endless and silencing them or changing the
settings is only within the purview of non – existent gods. In the meantime,
the infernal alerts must be checked every minute with compulsive frenzy just in
case something life – changing or life – affirming crops up demanding an
immediate reply. Or lest one misses out on something inane because it is
trending. This is the daily, eternal grind humanity is trapped in.
After all,
oblivion is preferable to not knowing what is right or whom to root for anymore
since everyone is a hellion or hellraiser. Moral ambiguity is the norm as is
self – serving ambition and personal vanity. Even without the aid of AI,
everyone is most articulate in speaking the language of justice, but none can
live it. In this virtual panopticon we inhabit irrespective of left or right
based ideology, all are capable of performative outrage, faux sensitivity, and
affected affinity over lost causes but none can scrounge up the virtue, guts
and moral grit to take affirmative action and rescue anyone at all including
the self from hell.
This article was originally published in TNIE Magazine
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