The World Is Ending... Pass the Popcorn

Regimes toppling, countries threatening to vanish off the face of the earth. Wait, the earth may itself have officially entered an existential crisis in 2024. But Happy New Year

- SANTWANA BHATTACHARYA

We are not alone in the world in being insular as a people. Let there be the smoke of war and burnt flesh wafting in and mixing with crop stubble ash in our air. Or the noise of people's coups around the corner. Regimes toppling as if in a game theory scenario come true, countries threatening to disappear off the map. Yes, the world order itself can shift its axis. It really did, in 2024, the year that saw the birth pangs of a world about to come.

But we don't look up from our phones. Let the Cassandras say the world could be ending, they always say that anyway. Our traumas are related to a web series ending. Catch us taking our eyes off the last over of a T20 match, a Turkish thriller, or whatever your poison is. Just give us our caramelized popcorn in our push-back multiplex seats, and we Indians won't trouble the world thereafter. At least for the next couple of hours. We never get much troubled by it anyway.

We are not alone in the world in various other ways either. The year we are leaving behind was the hottest ever since temperature recording on a planetary scale began in 1880. Come to think of it, that means hotter than any time during the entire life span of many modern nations, including ours. Nationalism itself, as an accepted way of dividing up the planet, has been in full force for only about a century. Could that finally be a trigger for us to think together as a species?