Decent?

June 11, 2020

I couldn't sleep last night. In fact, I had a restless evening -- pacing the length of my living room. Ten steps in one direction and then ten in the other. My fitbit recorded almost 4000 steps in that hour. 

Two things happened yesterday that I found difficult to process. 

I attended a discussion through ISAS on Modi 1.0 and 2.0. The panellists spoke on three different areas of governance – foreign policy, economics and politics. It felt like they were disconnected from the reality on the ground in India. They spoke as if it was business as usual, not as if India was facing its biggest crisis since Independence. As I listened I did understand the enormity of the economic issues at a level that was mind boggling. I could see how there were absolutely no quick fixes. At the same time what I was hearing was the same formulae based on trickle-down economics. And the actions of the BJP of focusing on politicking rather than the pressing issues also seemed even more horrendous, though the speakers barely mentioned it. At one time I wondered if I was a bit crazy to be feeling this so intensely while the speakers were so cool. But then I read the questions from the audience and found echoes of myself in them. They seemed as irritated as me about what the panellists were completely ignoring.

Soon after I read an email, by a friend in the email chat we had set up to just talk about our lives during covid times. She had attached a link of an article with an excerpt from ‘Humankind: A Hopeful History’, by the Dutch author Rutger Bregman. Basically the article talked about how humans were at heart decent and during disasters they acted from their best selves. 

I feel no doubt about either – that people are decent rather than evil and that during face to face interactions with someone vulnerable most of us act from our best selves. Yet the word decent didn’t fit with what I had been feeling ever since I watched the migrant labour in India on the roads -- no longer hidden and invisible in their inhuman dwellings and lives. Their faces, young and old; their dead bodies, their hunger is etched deep in my psyche now. I have always known they exist. I have managed to blank them out in the past. Turn away from the bony ragged man selling trinkets at traffic lights. Read a book, watch some tv. I did that for a while last evening too, but the disturbance was still there this morning. 

Anne Frank wrote in her diary, "I keep my ideals, because in spite of everything I still believe that people are really good at heart."

I don’t know how I keep my ideals or what they are. I have been grappling with my own lack of 'decency'. I can't call myself decent when I am only reacting to this reality of the life of the slum dweller or unorganised labour only when it suits me. At other times I remain caught up in my own little problems and dreams. 

The article also quoted Rebecca Solnit, from her book, A Paradise Built in Hell. “My own impression is that elite panic comes from powerful people who see all humanity in their own image…. Dictators and despots, governors and generals – they all too often resort to brute force to prevent scenarios that exist only in their own heads, on the assumption that the average Joe is ruled by self- interest, just like them.” I think we need to withdraw our projections on dictators and despots and explore our own brute force and self-interest responses to things. I also know that I don’t need to read books that define humanity as good or bad. At some point in the past I needed answers to those questions. But now I’d rather deal with each case on its on merit and not say usually, they all, generally, broadly etc.

My questions now are about my own decency, about how I live my life, how I reconcile the relative ease of it, while also feeling the hopelessness of increasingly larger sections of this world. Nothing new in these questions. A lot of people have grappled with them, written about them. I need to just connect to them daily and feel through, change my life as possible answers appear.