Good Morning 2000

Good Morning 2000

DECEMBER 31: Century in the life of a nation is a prolonged pause in eternity. Maybe measured time captured in the memory of the living. This morning, the first morning of a new century, of a new millennium, we are prompted by the calendar, yes, those backpages of time measured, to renew memory, to refurbish resolutions, to clothe hope in aspirations. Because every port of disembarkation in the time travelling man is an invitation to the next astonishment. As we look back from the inaugural dawn of the twenty-first century, do the astonishments of the last one hundred years make us wiser? Do they make us better prepared for tomorrows? Yes, we have survived the script of renewal authored by men who thought they could suspend the course of history.

They played out the script for one singular purpose: the creation of a New Man.It was a script of wars and revolutions, authored by Frankensteins swayed by, well, superior knowledge, superior theories -- artists whose canvases were stretched beyond the limits ofhistorical space. Lenin landed in Finland Station not with the commandments of that bearded German Jehovah. The Russian Revolution, in retrospect, was not a people's revolution. It was a coup legitimised by the twisted text of communism. Stalin upgraded Leninism and extended it to the graveyard, to the chilly remoteness of Siberia. At the end of it all, it was not the New Man. It was the Dead Man.

The Soviet Union was this century's biggest artificial empire kept alive for eighty years not by the popular instinct for freedom but by the cannibalistic instinct of the Leader, who pretended to possess the copyright over every man's conscience. That was the totalitarian pretence.The dominion of that pretence colonised the major part of the twentieth century. The so-called socialist satellites revolved around the Kremlin and highlighted the politics of dehumanisation. Show trials, labour camps, proletarian pogroms, the murdered Imre Nagy, crushed Prague Spring -- what a revolutionary narration. Maybe there is amessage in that inverted truth: Man makes revolution, and revolution makes use of men. Every tyrant of ideology, whether Stalin or Mao, had sworn that they were the chosen instruments of freedom. The victims of the twentieth century were victims of the fantasy of freedom. And freedom was not always defined by revolution alone. For, the last century saw the barbarism of nationalism banishing the lesser race to what was so dispassionately called concentration camps.

Adolf Hitler, one of the most defining evils of the twentieth century, the architect of Auschwitz, singularly wrote the definition of national identity on a page blackened by the carbonised memory of vanished Jews. No nation was ever re-invented in such a horrible fashion.But it was a century of survival. The world has survived Hitler, the wars, and communism. What Churchill called the Iron Curtain was tore apart by the passion play of history. In 1989, Europe annus mirabilis, people triumphed over the party. In Eastern Europe of enforced idyll,streets and souls erupted; countries confessed and broke down. The fall of a false promise. True, the post-89, post-cold war world was not witness to the retreat of history Hegelian or otherwise. We saw ancient ghosts marching out of the trapdoors of history. We saw them dancing in Bosnia and elsewhere. We saw them parodying the Fuhrer, we saw them feasting on hate, we saw them drawing new borderlines.

Primordial passions raged and took their toll, but a century that was so used to the grotesqueries of the chosen Man survived that rage. Perhaps the novelist is right: ``Who can deny that murder is the defining act of our century, as other centuries might have been defined by prayer or mendicancy? Who can put hand on heart and say that the characteristic gesture of the twentieth century is not that of one person killing another? Fifty million dead in the second World War alone, let alone the Great War and all the other wars, civil and international, man-made famines, individual kill-ings, race killings, themurders we commit all the time, the murder we are committing even as we sit here, of indifference to those being murdered ... Every murder contains within itself all murder; each individual act that takes another person's life is the microcosm of our century...''There were murderers, there were redeemers too.

The Mahatma, Martin Luther King, Mandela, Gorbachev ... In volume, the act of sacrifice, or the act of martyrdom, was nothing compared to the act of murder. There was a frail old Indian whose philosophy of resistance was accepted by history without a pinch of salt. His victory was India's independence from the British raj. There was a South African who could reduce the racial distance between black and white with a smiling face. There was a Russian who sculpted a granite empire to a humane form call him Mikhailangelo. They didn't pretend that they were creating the New Man. They reinstated the honour of eve-ry man. Today, this morning, we, the survivors, are the living testaments of their triumph,their struggle, their humility. There is no supreme leader to define our freedom.

That familiar word, democracy, is our collective adjective because we refused to be trampled by big ideas. We are united in this century not by ghost-written slogans. The unifying idea is literally in the machine, made flexible by the movement of mouse. McLuhan's of global village has been captured in a miniature form on a computer screen by Bill Gates. The time machine is not a metaphor any more.Every future is fabulous, wrote a man of optimism. At this moment of millennial catharsis, we are historically trained to write our fables. Wish you all a fabulous century. And good morning.