A SHAMAN WHO SHATTERED THE LENS ON ANTHROPOCENE

The West views the Anthropocene era, in which man is destroying Earth, through economic cost-benefit analyses. A conference paper offered an alternative approach through new storytelling

- SHIV VISVANATHAN

HE big problem with information today is not noise, but silence. The latter is the most eloquent part of a lecture. Yet, one never asks about the kind of violence that precedes every part of a story.

My next-door neighbour, a sociologist, recently commented, “Why is everyone talking about development when they should be talking about the Anthropocene? Silence needs a new kind of storytelling.” It reminded me about a Pakistani social scientist who talked at length about a conference.

Tonce met Ziauddin Sardar, the well-known futurist, at Perth airport. We had three hours to kill. He was returning from a conference, and I from visiting relatives. Zia was a wonderful gossip and even more entertaining as a social scientist. He was a genuine South Asian. He wrote the most interesting article on the Ambassador car—I wish Ratan Tata had read it before he introduced the Nano.

On this day in Perth, Zia was waiting to gossip—not just about the conference, but about his old colleagues and friends in India. He felt gossip was disappearing. And gossip, he felt, made eccentricity and dissent available. This is what he felt made India of the 1970s so interesting. Zia desperately missed his colleagues at the Centre for the Study of Developing Societies. India, he felt, had become rigid and straightforward. He felt that the present regime had added to the mediocrity, destroying India’s sense of play and dissent.

I asked Zia about the changes. He sat silently for a while, drinking his coffee. Then he said that today, the future is an extrapolation, regimented into a straight line of expectations. Earlier, the future was a domain of dissent and diversity. The future is a pretext for freedom—an invitation to the