To Hell with It

 

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