Time, perhaps to earn itself some street cred, may elect “the protestor” as its person of the year, but for me it’s two other people who deserve to share that honour in 2011: the fallen idol and the departed icon.
Think about it. From all walks of life, from every exalted pedestal, heroes, poster boys, demi-gods and even civil society’s chosen ones, fell off their perches with alarming alacrity.
Global bankers, internationally celebrated consultants, business leaders, holier-than-thou activists, media mavens, swashbuckling publishers and sweet-talking diplomats, who were all the apple of the media’s eye, once considered great and good, were revealed to be the shifty and fragile in more instances than one cares to recount.
You could say it was a year of bad hair for all those who wore a halo.
But we live in such times when leaks, taps, plants, stings, honey traps are no more the subject of a fourth grader’s science lesson. When technology becomes the collective conscience of an age, the result is a flat world for human vulnerability. In the stakes for human failing, every one is equal, a potential goof up. It’s the age of equal opportunity for public collapse.
Ask not who the breaking news is about. It breaks for you.
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The point, of course, is so what? And more importantly, where does one go from here? When even the exalted are exposed as ordinary and the high steppers as those with feet of clay, do we cling to our age-old ethical totem poles or do we adjust our moral compasses to the zeitgeist?
“Ring the bells that still can ring /Forget your perfect offering /There is a crack in everything /That’s how the light gets in,” sang the poet-folk singer Leonard Cohen, an apt anthem for our times.
And just when the world needed as many heroes as it could get, 2011 saw a procession of them check out. It was as if a celestial bell had rung and all the world’s men and women of courage, of talent and integrity, had packed their bags and decided it was time to leave.
The year saw a curious depletion of human resource. It began as a trickle with MF Hussain and Amy Winehouse, gathered momentum with Jehangir Sabavala, Mansoor Ali Khan Pataudi, Jagjit Singh and then became a flood with Steve Jobs, Shammi Kapoor, Dev Anand and Mario Miranda.
Social networks clanged with the baffled grief of the perennially sentimental. Obituary writers had to trawl new depths to come up with adequate adjectives for homage and loss.
After a while, people overdosed on sadness and attempted to change their focus from death to life. Babies, especially those of celebrities, natural-born or surrogate, came as a welcome relief at the end of annus horribilis.
What a strange year it’s been. With the triumvirate of the protestor, the fallen idol and the departed icon leading its sombre procession out.
Who could have explained it better than Sheldon Cooper in The Big Bang Theory, “Scissors cut paper, paper covers rock, rock crushes lizard, lizard poisons Spock. Spock smashes scissors, scissors decapitates lizard, lizard eats paper, paper disproves Spock, Spock vaporises rock, and as it always has, rock crushes scissors.”
The protestor, the fallen idol and the departed icon. Perhaps they are more connected than we realise. Perhaps they exist because of each other.
Scissors . Paper. And rock.
Malavika Sangghvi is a Mumbai-based writer