Are you thinking?

I am reading a book set in the Syrian Civil War. Specifically, a year into the Syrian revolution. Prior to this, my context of the Syrian Revolution was purely academic in a very kindergarten way. Assad bad. Assad kills innocent Syria people. Syria people fight. Assad lose. It’s the kind of knowledge you pick up at house parties when some guy at 2 a.m. decides to explain it just to escape the other political topic he knew even less about. Nobody has any idea about any of the topics being discussed. But it’s better than being alone.

Or is it? I have started to wonder.

Knowledge comes easily now. It’s in your pocket. You read it with your eyes and throw it out of your mouth. There is no reason for it to ever enter or stay in your brain. I don’t need to know about any humanitarian crisis anywhere. ChatGPT knows. If required, I’ll ask it. I feel this is the real humanitarian crisis. What does stay in your brain is the “why are you gay” meme. You’ve learned to time it perfectly in various conversations and gather a homophobic applause from the crowd. It’s ok. It’s funny. Nobody cares.

The book I am reading keeps making me realise my privileges. A young boy, who has shrapnel inside him because his home was bombed, is at the hospital. His final words before passing on to the heavens are: “Don’t worry. I’ll tell God about all this.”My heart aches at an intensity it has never ached before. I keep the book down for a brief moment and gulp down a sip of water from my Stanley mug. Someone is at the door. Third delivery of the day. God, such a pain. I go back to reading after collecting my delivery and find myself immersed in the pain of this young girl who hasn’t had food in three days because the nearby grocery market has been looted. No deliveries for her.

I take some solace in the fact that it’s fiction. I don’t have the heart to go on the internet and figure out if this fiction is close to the truth or not. I know it is, but I want to lead my life practicing apathy. It’s comforting.

I’ve read half the book and three-fourths of the town is dead already. I keep the book down to look for something cheerful. A podcast has dropped where two rich guys are discussing the future of society, dropping precious advice for everyone like two Santa Clauses. Christmas has come early. Millions applaud. Reason unknown. Possibly because now we know someone who knows someone who knows that rich guy. Sidenote: I find it quite amusing when people like to casually slip in how they know some random famous person in a conversation that’s totally unrelated to that person. This disease is spreading like wildfire. I resist almost every time saying, “And?”, just to see how they respond.

Anyway, my good friend Salman and I are more interested in the reception of the podcast than the podcast itself. I sometimes fear that the internet has taken away our critical thinking. Or maybe capitalism has taken away our critical thinking. We applaud everything that agrees with our biases. We criticise everything that opposes us. We don’t have opinions anymore; we have fandoms. We are either fans or haters. We are not in-betweeners anymore. We are not normal anymore. Our heroes have changed and been replaced by capitalists right in front of our eyes. When did this happen, and is there a way to reverse it? I open the book again. I’d rather take this pain. It’s my privilege to close that YouTube tab.

The boy in the book records the revolution and uploads it on YouTube for the world to see. He gets about a hundred views and a few comments. “Our names will be erased and the world will never get to know about our story,” the protagonist says in a moment of despair. I get a funny thought. The same line can also be applied to all the influencers if their internet gets taken away. I chuckle at my own joke and continue reading. It’s sad. A couple of weeks ago, I had posted a story urging people to read more fiction. The internet was divided suddenly and unshockingly. A news agency called me to get my quote. But that was my quote, I told them, before respectfully disconnecting and blocking the number. The whole idea was to talk to the people who dismiss fiction as a waste of time. It wasn’t to diss non-fiction. It wasn’t to promote bad Chetan Bhagat fiction, and it wasn’t to demote historical non-fiction either. But anyway, “read better” is how I concluded.

However, there was this one message which did, in fact, make me look at the other side of the picture. A boy, not more than 20, said that he reads his college books and is preparing for some government exams, so whenever he gets time, he tries to read an autobiography of a famous historical person because it will help him in the interviews.

The point I made in the post was to not make life so transactional, but the reality that some of us live does make it hard to not make it transactional.

The reality that the girl is living in this book is transactional. She wakes up to save people in the hospital and have enough money by the end of it to buy some bread. Transactional. He reads to survive the interview. She works to survive the day. I read to survive my boredom. Transactional. Transactional. Transactional.

The sad thing is I know that when I finish this book, I will shut it, switch off the light, and tomorrow the world will look almost exactly the same. The only thing I can hope is that something inside me doesn’t go back to exactly the same shape. That the next time I casually say I “know” about some war, some crisis, some country, I remember at least one boy, one girl, one book. That if anyone is telling God about all this, I am not standing there empty-headed, having nothing to add except that I scrolled past it because I was listening to some guy on a podcast talking about everyone’s future. I hope the present starts mattering more in my conversations.