Prema Jayakumar

There is so much strife all over the world. Is it that this is an exceptionally violent time in history? There are reports, there have been reports for over a year now, from the borders between Uzbekistan and Russia, from their cities that are bombed and are suddenly just masses of rubble. There is communal strife in our own Manipur, and neighbours have turned out to be enemies. And now latest of all, Gaza is once more a fire bomb in itself. Do all promised lands bring so much violence with them? Wars are not just about territory and power, they are also about the people whose lives are entangled in them, questioning even their right to live. They shake the worlds of the people caught up in them more or less as an earthquake or tsunami does. The ground is no longer firm beneath your feet and the routines of every day that you had taken for granted are no longer possible. Life becomes a strange thing, one of ensuring that you and if possible, your own people, survive the day. Survival is all there is. Death is the only great emotion.
This happens at the time of natural disasters as well. You see eyes from which all light has vanished, dull eyes that look on the world indifferently even if the owners of the eyes are glad to have survived. It is as though the very fact of survival has exhausted all the life force in them and left them shells of what they had been. It is not only the physical danger, it is the loss of everything that was familiar, everything that added meaning to your life, gifts, keepsakes, clothes, memories tied up in everyday objects. Children no longer go to school, they are denied their right to study, to acquire knowledge, to grow up. They have probably been damaged for life. As Josephine Hart, the Irish novelist said, ‘Damaged people are dangerous. They know they can survive.’ They have survived, but at what cost to their selves?
Sometimes personal disasters to have this effect. To a much smaller scale of course, but devastating all the same for the person who suffers it. The loss of someone dear to you to death or disease, or to another preferred life that does not include you, can reduce the remaining person to a zombie-like creature, who goes through the motions of living without actually engaging with life. They find that the colour is drained out of everything, leaving a drab and dull light that blurs everything and life becomes just something to be lived through, endured. You really don’t know why you were born or why you go on living, but you do anyway. You drift through life, having given up all agency over it, not attempting to take control at all.
What happens when these conflicts die down? How does a people that has been subjected to the dehumanising nature of the struggle for survival come back to a more or less normal life? What happens when the wars have ended, when the flood waters have receded, the earth has become firm underfoot again? What happens to the people who have lost years of their lives, everything they held dear, everything that added meaning and colour to their lives? Do they return to normal life? Do they start living again, as against just surviving from day to day? How do they fill the gaps that death has made amongst them? So many questions and each without a proper answer.
How do we find meaning in this ‘tale told by an idiot, full of sound and fury, signifying nothing’? How do the survivors find meaning once the fury is over? When does mere survival become living again? Just now it seems easier to ask questions than to find answers. But then, great philosophers have tried and sometimes found answers, and that has not changed the behaviour of the human species at all, even answers will have to wait for a quieter time to be heard.
Maybe now that the furies of Pandora’s box are out all over the world, all that is left is the feeble hope that came out last, to which we hold on so that we may live rather than just survive.