Before and After Mars

As the title suggests, yes, I went to see The Martian too. I was very very impressed seeing Matt Damon harvest his successful crop of shit-laced Martian potatoes, eat a few and then make it successfully back to Earth in one piece. But I couldn’t help wondering why Matt Damon ever wanted to come back to such an obnoxious planet that is infested with the most poisonous of living organisms, supposedly considered to be the highest form of life on the planet. Man. A species so carnally deteriorated that the fully matured ones have deviated towards feeding on the infants of the species to appease their ghastly lust for flesh.

The Martian was a fantastic experience. However, the best of our experiences are often marred by what precedes it and what ensues right after. And, this is exactly what marred The Martian for me, and it had nothing to do with the way the movie was or the actors were.

So, off to what happened before….

I have always loved those specially made national Anthem videos which are usually played in movie halls before the movie commences. Though the practice has been in and out of controversies forever, and despite my own head whispering sometimes in my ear that the practice is debatable, I have always secretly enjoyed and revered those sessions, simply because 1) I personally believe that we have the best National Anthem in the world… gives me goose bumps every time it plays 2) It takes me all the way back to my school days when I was a drummer in the school band drumming along as the school sang Jana Gana Mana during school assemblies.

The National anthem video which was played before The Martian featured the Indian Army troops posted atop the Siachen Glacier, battling the unforgiving landscape and the harsh weather conditions to unfurl the Indian Tricolour amidst the rising crescendo of the chorale. The undying spirit of the Army is so venerable… But the number of soldiers who die from random cross-border firings and adverse weather conditions are so high. As the anthem drew to a close I exhaled a silent wish into the void..  If only I could look at the Siachen Glacier, as just a glacier, a marvel of nature that two nations were just proud of sharing a scenic view of and not as a frigid army outpost that pits man against not only nature, but against his own kind. Well, we really don’t have a choice here, do we?

Then The Martian unfurled. A spectacle. A beautiful sci-fi illusion of alienation on the Red planet that lasted a couple of hours. Real possibilities are sweet (not often), but those unreal are sweeter. (-me) Aren’t they? So was The Martian. Sweeter than reality. Larger than life.

The euphoria of the short sojourn on Martian soil lasted only until the next day dawned… Only until I read the newspaper and got rudely jolted back to hostile earthly matters.

The morning newspaper brought with it the horror of toddler rapes across the nation’s capital. 5 year old…4 year old…2 year old…little girls... babies, .. all lured out of the safety of their homes or guardians under false pretexts by acquaintances and brutally raped. Little children tend to trust too much. They should be taught that ‘trust’ is an illusion. They should be trained to become paranoid if they are already not. Paranoia works better than trust, where we live.

And… Where was ‘the mob’ when this happened? ‘The famous mob’ who decides who does what, and what goes under, over and into the big belly of this nation of malignant viruses.  If for some nations the curse had manifested in the form of teenagers wielding weapons of mass destruction, for ours it has come to be expressed in the form of 15 and 16 and 17 year olds and perhaps even younger ones, wielding their manhood against innocent infant lives, shattering the living spirit out of any mind still capable of rational thought.

I am sick of Earth at this moment… sick of the Nation….sick of all things human…Feeling nauseous to be alive at such an era in the history of our nation. Sick.