Let us accept it. The sun sank last evening, disappointed. Disappointed in us, earthlings. In the way we are treating the earth and each other.
Let us accept this fact too: The sun that has risen on the new year this morning has done so, rather unsurely, in hope.
Hoping against hope about the future of Planet Earth in the custody of Man, and the future of the weak under the domination of the strong.
“Planet Earth?” its ruthless custodian asks. “What in hell is that?”
“I know what the world is. I do great business with it. I know what the globe is. I circle it with my spaceships and get a hold of it. But the earth …whatever is that?” When told about the earth being the home of our homes and when reminded of the perils posed to it by something called the climate crisis, Man retorts, “Rubbish.” When gently reminded that rubbish is, in fact, what he has created and which he dumps unflaggingly into the rivers, seas, coasts, and mountain slopes, he repeats, “rubbish, rubbish.” And lets the zillion times zillionth plastic bottle go bobbing into the nearest hillside or seafront.
And as to the domination of the weak by the strong, he raises a fist and says, “It is the duty of the strong to dominate the world. They are strong so that they can rule and protect the world.” When gently, too gently, told that the strong are not strong because God made them so, and the weak are not weak because they are meant to be weak, he snorts, “Everyone wants me, Man, to be Superman. Now you, little imp, you get lost!”
This is the inherited legacy of 2024 deposited on the doorstep of 2025.
The scene is dire. But it may not yet be a “done deal”. The new sun today says: The summer of 2024 shattered temperature records, melting the Greenland and West Antarctic ice sheets, and thawing permafrost. But it did not make the Antarctic ice cap come apart. Our own glaciers in Himalayan India turned thin. But did not — not yet — turn the mountain range into naked rock. The demising forest fires and wildfires, mostly caused by Man’s greatest handiwork — global warming — still left, as if absent-mindedly, many forests standing. The world’s wildlife, bewildered, lost its way, strayed into human habitats, and adjusted to the change of sets.
India rightly described the allocations approved at the 29th Conference of Parties to the United Nations Framework Convention on Climate Change for developing countries “to ramp up climate action” as “a paltry sum”. The amounts being given will just about help the climate and climate-dependent resources survive. We must ask for — insist on — more. But what of our own “charity” in our own “home”?
Is the relentless concretisation of our landscape in the name of development not irreversibly changing the character of land, mountains, and rivers? We are to launch the Great Nicobar Project at a cost of ₹72,000 crore which will transform that pristine patch of earth into something that will threaten “rare and endemic species, rainforests, marine life and the tribal population.” This may be developmental karma, but it is not ecological dharma.
We dodged, in 2024, the collective death that the year’s deadly wars were threatening us with. The North Atlantic Treaty Organization (Nato)’s United States (US)-made long-range missiles zoomed into Russia. But the quivering nuclear button in Moscow did not get to feel the tip of President Vladimir Putin’s forefinger. Hamas wreaked all the horrors it did to innocents and belligerents, but there was worse it could have done. And Israel, with the blood of other innocents on its hands, did not actually ‘finish’ Gaza.
World War III hissed over us but did not actually break out. We can clasp our hands and thank the Gods of Good Luck that the year 2024 scorched and scalded but did not blight or blast the world out of existence. It just about let it survive.
Today, if we survive, we are saving ourselves from ourselves. We are escaping from our own predations. Survival from death is not what life is about.
Let us ponder this from Al Jazeera, about the Israel-Palestine war: “Since October 7, 2023, Israel has killed at least 17,400 children in Gaza, according to Palestinian officials. That is one child killed every 30 minutes. Thousands more are missing under the rubble, most of them presumed dead. The surviving children, many of whom have endured the traumatic impact of multiple wars, have spent their lives under the shadow of an Israeli blockade, influencing every aspect of their existence from birth.”
And this from UNICEF, no less, about the Russia-Ukraine (read Russia-Nato) war: “According to official UN data, at least 600 children have been killed in attacks since the escalation of the war in 2022. More than 1,350 children have been injured. The true number of children killed and injured is likely considerably higher.”
Before the might of the belligerent, we are all innocents; we are all children. As Nato vows vengeance and Russia reconsiders its nuclear doctrine, there is nothing to show the world will be safer for us, its children, in 2025. Plumes of hate rise from the mounds of death. These have formed into dense clouds over our own precariously precious patch of the earth. Bigotry tries to drive science and intolerance to prescribe the nostrums of faith in the India that is Bharat.
While Man’s sense of right and wrong has shrunk, he has created in AI a power more intelligent than itself but with no ethics whatsoever to guide it. If we do not check it, we could well perish at our own hands.
The simmering turbulence in Bangladesh portends no ordinary danger. Noakhali and Bihar in 1946, Bengal and Punjab in 1947 ask, “Will 2025 protect India?”
The answer comes in a 79-year-old’s prayer in the months before his voice was stilled: Sabko sanmati de Bhagavan.
Gopalkrishna Gandhi, a former administrator, is a student of modern Indianhistory. The views expressed are personal
