Hypothethicals

“Tom Hiddleston is a fantastic actor”, I think to myself as I see him walking down a crowded street of Cairo on my laptop screen which needs to be brighter and cleaner for me to really appreciate all the colours in his eyes. I begin watching The Night Manager: it is difficult to not admire Jonathan Pike. Well, not when you’re only one episode down. And then you see him reading a list of weapons, the word ‘napalm’ focused on and then talked about twice later. I had to google it up, first while watching the episode, satisfying myself with a dictionary definition, and second to actually understand, or at least try to understand weaponry as much as I can.

I come across Joe Biden looking at Phan Thi Kim Phuc’s photo where she’s photographed running down the street with napalm burns. That website suggests me to read something about the history of ‘Agent Orange’ next. I click on it, not because I have any idea what I would be getting myself into, but because one of my sisters’ friends’, in some presentation, had used a font I loved looking at so much that I would try to copy and draw it in my notebook; it was called ‘Agent Orange’. I used to think it was some cool funky cartoon character from comics like Tintin or Asterix that I had not read. Till today. Reading about ‘Agent Orange’ and the Vietnam war makes me think of Bhopal, Union Carbide, and the gas leak.

I cannot help but wonder who these people are, the ones who dedicate their entire lives to researching war weapons. I wonder how is it that I, as an Indian person in London writing my Masters dissertation talking about dealing with differences such that each unit in conversation has the space for their own autonomy, spend hours and hours every day reading about past and present creative ventures to be able to arrive at a semblance of an argument and still feel unsure, for I know someone else will build on my argument and make it much better. Honestly, I would love that. Please make my ideas better. I know I am not the best person when it comes to dealing with differences. I am still learning, and trying to learn better, and then trying to experiment if it can be translated on larger scales using models of experiment that may or may not make any sense whatsoever, but I commit to it for the sake of my dissertation argument. I have to.

Contradicting my own self helps. I am learning to find a balance in my essays where academic writing’s conviction does not overshadow the flexibility that negotiating differences demands. There. Another definitive word.

I wonder how the people developing weapons find the conviction to, if they have to write papers looking at its pros and cons. I wonder if they sit in a room looking at its consequences. I wonder what these consequences look like. Are they numbers denoting the area of impact or are they numbers considering the breaths it would cease, the eyes it would gouge, the bones that would freeze, the heart that will crouch.

Do these numbers look at the number of hopes it will turn into debris, along with the number of buildings it will crumble? Do these numbers look at the fear it will spread? If the spreading of fear is the fundamental characteristic of ‘terrorism’, do these numbers look at the terrorists it breeds in the name of research? I wonder if the room with this research discussion looks like a large white oval table facing a huge computer screen with images of burnt people that the people from the oval table look at and decide to photocopy in more than 4D.

I wonder if the glass walls of this room are strong enough to protect them from both the heat and the cold of the people this room would be holding. I wonder how researching weaponry works, if researching weaponry is even a phenomenon.

One of my favourite TV shows is Rocket Boys; the story of India’s nuclear and space mission told in the story of Homi Bhabha and Vikram Sarabhai’s friendship. The first episode begins with a fight between two best friends: Bhabha calling Sarabhai a national traitor because he walks away from signing the papers initiating India’s nuclear programme. India was a newly independent nation then. The India-Pakistan partition was still on our minds. Barely were we learning to design our own selves that here we were, unconsciously oppressed under the threat of nuclear nations protecting even the raw materials of making a nuclear bomb, let alone consider non-hierarchical international relations.

I wonder who it was that decided we needed weapons to protect. I am certain it was someone under attack, and I understand the need, I think. But who ARE we protecting ourselves from in this constant invention of weapons where we have ended up designing a world where people inventing more weapons get paid more? How is destruction so easily funded? How did we end up designing such a world? Who are we protecting ourselves from? More people who are too proud to ask themselves why we are attacking in the first place?

And how do we protect ourselves from people who keep designing such worlds? Should we even protect ourselves from them? Would it not be hypocritical to protest against such a design of the world using the same design? How, then, do we reshape a world where destruction finds easier support?

I recently conducted a workshop where an elemental breakdown of stories led someone to not recognise their own story which has now turned into a cultural definitive with symbols recognised internationally for its complementary duality. I am learning that upon separating a practice, a ritual, a performance, a cultural norm, from its stories, we learn that our consciousnesses are constantly asking the same question: how do we stop being afraid? And we came up with different stories which created different worlds to answer that question.

Artists are storytellers experimenting with different mediums to tell their stories. I believe everyone does that, artists just admit and commit to doing that through their lives. I may be able to think these thoughts now that I am a student, but the “practical world” where I have to look for a job will demand me to write to sell products I may never be able to endorse. The “practical world” still will not pay people telling stories to answer what makes us afraid.

My spam email has job offers from what I can only assume to be fake MI6, and my YouTube shows me ads with jobs in the British Army. Money is a tempting entity. Everyone needs it. And frankly, I would not mind working with intelligence, it sounds exciting. I grew up reading adventure novels and falling in love with Sherlock.

And then I think about politics and all that I know working for intelligence would entail. Nationalism and patriotism are strangely experienced ideas. How does one love without wondering about loving better, loving kinder, without thinking about how to make the relationship better, without thinking about how much you love them but how much tweaking something could make that entity much more beautiful? Does wanting to love better negate the love in the present? Does an urge for betterment necessarily have to mean that the current state of being is unloved?

How does one commit to something one does not, cannot, wholly believe in? “Would I want to work with intelligence?” is not the same question as “Would I want to work with British intelligence?”, is it? Hypotheticals, these questions that are never going to be acted upon by me. No one really needs anyone with a Master’s degree in Theatre. Hell, no one needs anyone with a Master’s degree in the Humanities. We’re only storytellers.

Then again, perhaps if we lived in a world where storytellers were as funded as weaponmakers, if not more, empathy would be easier to produce? Perhaps if we lived in a world where creation was considered to be a legitimate career option, compassion would not even need to be produced? Perhaps if we asked ourselves more often “how do I stop being afraid?”, we would not need weapons?

Perhaps storytellers will always remain “useless”, as they even should. Why would anyone have to measure themselves in terms of productivity? But then, can there be a world without weapons? I remember reading about how, in the remains of the Indus Valley Civilisation, they found tools but no weapons. I was sixteen when I had read that, when I had learnt the difference between the function of those two words, when I had learnt that it was even possible to differentiate those two functions.

Perhaps there can exist a world without the need to destroy. Perhaps in a world where creators lived more fulfilled lives, destruction could be destroyed. Then again, can it ever?

Can Love ever be non-violent?

Perhaps what I am trying to ask is, does physical destruction of something that has never belonged to us (in a world where the only thing that we could lay claim over being our own selves) have to be a normalised part of our realities?

Isn’t the passage of time in itself a cycle of creation and destruction and constant creation?

Can there exist a world with more space for spiritual destruction so that physical destruction was not deemed as necessary as it is today?

Are these merely irrelevant hypotheticals?