It’s been a few months since the Euro came into being as a tactile, real coins and notes currency, and within a month, two of the European Union’s member states have bravely shelved their own money without the slightest of patriotic wishy-washiness, Ireland being the most recent, having put the Punt to rest after the Netherlands buried its Guilder. I remember a cartoon in Newsweek about the time the USSR was in the throes of disintegrating. The world map of the 80’s was coloured with the USSR as one large red mass and Western Europe as a collection of fragments, like the paint bricks in a watercolour set that have gotten all mixed up. The frame alongside it was a 90’s map, with the countries that now make up the European Union (EU) as a large blue mass with twelve golden stars, and Eastern Europe as a mass of coloured fragments. So much has changed in so short a time.
A currency is one of a nation’s most tangible, visible and emotional assets. Often decorated with images of heroes and idols, sometimes tucked under mattresses and floorboards, the mother of infamy and a barometer of one’s wealth or lack of it, currencies have ingrained themselves in the collective memory of their people. A speculative attack on the financial markets against a country’s exchange rate and the defence of it is seen more as a matter of national pride than an economic decision. Wars have been fought over stacks of coins, and will be… How many of us haven’t heard stories on how cheap things used to be? Who hasn’t saved the small change we found around the house as kids to buy an ice cream? Money touches every facet of our lives, it is felt, handled, cried and laughed over, hoarded and traded and forms the cornerstone of our individual and collective economies. Giving it up could not possibly be looked at as an act of weakness, but one of immense strength and courage.
On the other side of the world the picture paints itself in very different colours. The powers that be in the USA, drunk on their short term success of having avenged a dastardly attack on home turf by flushing out a relatively impotent arm of a ‘recently recognised’ (sic!) global terrorism network, have tried to distract their polity from internal problems of a recession and financial corruption and mismanagement (read: ‘George and the Enron Apple’ and ‘George and the budget deficit because my friends’ defence companies are more needy’) by creating passionately paranoid scenarios that even Hollywood could never match. What began as sympathy for the victims of the 9-11 tragedy was deftly manoeuvred by a constellation of global leaders into a front against terrorism, with every ‘friend’ or ‘not-enemy’ jumping on the bandwagon to be in the good books (India amongst the most ardent). But it didn’t stop there… that support was channelled into a bombing of an already ravaged land by a power that was many, many times its size in force and prosperity. One by one, voices of support have turned to voices of dissent, as this war against terrorism has become one of revenge. President Bush’s latest revelation of an ‘axis of evil’, another act to mesmerize a nation desperate for a hero, is just another stunt without substance or rationale. So ludicrous is this claim, that SatireWire, an online publication punned; "Bitter after being snubbed for membership in the ‘Axis of Evil,’ Libya, China, and Syria today announced they had formed the ‘Axis of Just as Evil,’ which they said would be way eviler than that stupid Iran-Iraq-North Korea axis President Bush warned of his State of the Union address.’ The words weren’t lost on the global press either which commented on the fact that Iran, Iraq and North Korea were the most unlikely nations to ever team up, considering their past histories and an ‘axis’ wasn’t even a distant reality.
What am I getting to? Who is right and who is wrong in this relentless struggle for existence? I don’t know, and unlike my less and more respected self-righteous peers, I won’t claim to. As human beings, on whichever side, angle or niche of the political, social and economic spectrum, we all share a naive belief that ‘we know’. We know we’re right and the other side is wrong, and saddled with this day and age’s advances in technology and science, we’re perhaps more sure of our ‘rightness’ than we’ve ever been. Sanctimoniously we’ll stand up tall and tell the less fortunate what to do because ‘we know’. We’ll tell them what is good for them, because ‘we know’. If they don’t agree we’ll force them, because ‘we know’ and if they’re equals, then we’ll fight them, because … ‘we know’. This belief in ourselves is supposed to give us strength, but it only makes us blind.
I remember a discussion during a year long stay in Europe, when a partner from a prominent ‘build-design’ firm felt he had to mention in a patronising tone that I was from an ‘uncivilized’ part of the world and wouldn’t know what high rise buildings were. I’m not ashamed that I sat there quietly. It wasn’t like a short rebuttal, had I had the spark to think up one, would have made a difference, nor did I mention to him that most buildings built in Mumbai, the city I grew up in, were over forty stories high and hardly ‘short’. Our ‘temples of education’ are no less righteous. We go to school, therefore we’re better than the others- if our school is better, we are better. If we sleep on beds and not on the floor of a mud hut somewhere on a distant hill in a village not large enough to be mapped, we’re superior. What is civilized and what is not, who is bad and who is good, was he right or was I or are you?
That stay in Holland also witnessed a dinner table debate over milk farmers in Northern Spain losing a culture that had survived centuries, because the common currency and lots of hormonal additives meant the Dutch farmer could milk his cows for much less and bankrupt his southern counterpart. Of course my heart bled, but isn’t change a natural phenomenon? As first year Architecture students, we’d go on study trips to small towns and villages, religiously documenting house forms and settlements, all the while telling the victims of our enthusiastic expedition that they should preserve their way of life because it was valuable and indigenous, even as they told us they wanted clothes like we had and TVs like we had and scooters and cars like we rode. We never stopped to wear their shoes and look through their eyes because ‘we knew’.
Globalisation as a force had reached those villages a decade ago, it has rooted itself and mutated itself in many ways across many shores since. Often enough, it is mistaken for capitalism, it isn’t necessarily so and it isn’t something to be scared of. It is a phenomenon that people have embraced, that has empowered in as much as it has destroyed, it is change that has been brought about by collapsing communication barriers and access to information and travel. A villager might still not travel to Greece or Switzerland in his lifetime, but he will get to see a town, he will get to hear the news from many sources, he will get to see more of life than he has, and if globalisation has failed, for what we see failure to be, it is only because it was never allowed to absorb and work more fully with local conditions (read economy, material, culture etc.) because of our ‘we know’ resistance to it.
Ironically if there is one nation it hasn’t touched, it is the one where it began, the USA. Armed with high tariff walls, a charade of a two party political ‘chad-crazy’ system that parades as a democracy, (the US’s antitrust regulator should take a look at this), an economy built on consumption and credit (called ‘freedom’), a more divisive economic demographic than almost any other nation in the world, the highest airline fares on the planet for outbound flights (check out what Ryanair offers, and they still turn a profit) characteristic of a large, obese and flawed economy, a handful of media companies entrusted with the task of ensuring ‘free speech and information’ but accountable only to their marketing teams and profit margins, one of the greatest causes of death in the US today is by shooting, and yet legislation to control the use of illegal firearms was ‘shot down’ as it curtailed individual freedom… the list is endless, and yet they say ‘we know’. India is no different. Even as its federal political makeup has been characterised by smaller regional parties, indicative of smaller groups thirsting for power, autonomy and a voice, it continues to deny this fact with jingoist, nationalist rabble-rousing in the name of nationhood, which make the aberrations on the ground bloodier with every passing day... ‘we know’ better. What outside enemy can you blame this on?
"Every epoch dreams of the next"… that even at their zenith and their prime, when the world lies at their feet and nothing seems impossible, empires live with the subconscious reality and the dream of their destruction. The Third Reich, member of the ‘axis of evil’ during World War II and better known as the Nazis, issued an edict that the institutions of power and symbols of the state be built in stone so that they may decay gracefully, the subliminal admittance of an ‘after’. Empires and Kingdoms have come and gone in this brief history of mankind that is inconsequential in the narration of the world we live in. The cockroach, far older than the human race, could perhaps boast of a richer history than we could ever hope for. The Roman Empire, Alexander’s kingdom, the once mighty Chinese realms that built walls that could circle the earth if they could, the French and British colonies or those of the Indian dynasties of the Mauryas, Chalukyas, Mughals… even Enron or K-Mart, with market caps that once totalled more than the GDPs of several mid-sized nations… all seemingly insurmountable, and yet they passed. History has been rewritten several times over to decide who was bad and who was good, rogues have become heroes and yesterday’s transgressors are today’s victims… but the fact remains, that they came and went.
I’m not a soothsayer or an America-basher. I’m not a terrorist and least of all someone who thinks ‘he knows’. But what we might be looking at today is the passing of yet another phase in our history. The imbalance of power that may arise in its passing may be bloody and tumultuous, but protecting it will only prolong and exacerbate the agony. Rushdie’s piece in the Guardian, that speaks of ‘anti Americanism’ that has grown by leaps and bounds in the last few months all over the world in reaction to America’s ‘we know’ behaviour post (and pre) 9-11, may be a far tougher enemy than the Taliban or any organised terrorist group could ever be.
Faced with a ‘fortress America’ on one side and the vision of a weaker Europe, the nations that formed the EU (save the UK) sacrificed their own identities, rich histories and centuries of sovereignty to move into a new reality in their collective best interests, just as the USSR was forced to fragment into smaller nations in their own quest to taste freedom and control their own destinies. Why should the fate of America or India or any other nation be any different? Change is something that comes from within and isn’t thrust upon you. It is something that is inevitable, if acknowledged it allows you to move further, if denied it festers like a cancer and you eventually die. Instead of pointing at an invisible enemy and inventing new ones, what might be needed is introspection. To look at and into oneself be it an individual, family, corporate, government or an entire nation or planet… to look not only at what you have to boast about through broadcast bravado, but also what you might have done wrong. All things must come to pass, just as time does, and change isn’t something we should fear, but accept and work with. Nothing is forever and never will be, here today, gone tomorrow, close your eyes, take a deep breath and live with that thought…
(The author is dreamer and drifter and tries not to put his money where his mouth is from past experience. An Architect by profession, he is currently pursuing a Graduate Degree in Urban Design in some new nomadic location. When last seen, he was lost!)
tanzeel@indiainfoline.com 
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