Dark days

I went for a movie exhibition at the Max Mueller Bhavan, and came out feeling devastated. The movies (see the listing at the link for the 18th) were just too direct and in-your-face about some of the terrible things going on that we aren't usually exposed to. One of the movie showed farmers spraying their cotton with more and more pesticides in an attempt to save their crop. The farmer would come back from a spraying session nauseated and with his tongue numb from the effect of the pesticide. There is not enough water to wash away the pesticide on his body properly so you imagine it slowly seeping through. The doctor at the local hospital talks about farmers being brought in sick either from the effects of the pesticide use or by directly ingesting it in despair to commit suicide. Other scenes showed raw industrial effluents being poured out directly into the water where it poisons the water we drink and the soil. Contamination building up and spreading, building up and spreading, building up and spreading... until ?
One of the film-makers used the language of insanity to describe what we are doing. One can disagree with such an extreme judgement but after watching that film you still are affected by the blackness of the picture painted.

The difficulty of watching such films is that you confront suffering that you normally are not exposed to. You are forced to try to comprehend the extent of the total bad stuff going on in the world, without any filters and without a balancing picture of the good stuff. For me, the question it raises is: how serious is my commitment to 'doing good' or social work in the face of probably complete futility of what you do in the big picture. Like, I would think, everybody else, I do what I do in the hope that there will be a significant/measurable impact. Or other motivations like its fascinating and stimulating and you feel like its a problem worth trying to solve. If only for a moment, all the rationalization and hope/belief are torn away and a picture of utter bleakness is offered -- of the incomprehensible amount of suffering in the world and the complete insignificance of what you might be able to do about it. (And as someone said in a previous conversation, all the efforts of the greatest souls in history Jesus, the Buddha, Gandhi whoever, has not saved us from the current mess, so the probable impact of such remarkable mortals as you and me can be guessed). So I am forced to look at my less-than-perfect motivations and see if there's anything deep enough that will keep me going in the face of it. Its a double-bind -- even if I say okay I wont do social work any more, the option of going back to a mainstream life is even less inviting -- it feels verily like fiddling while Rome burns, which is why one tried to get out in the first place.

Enough of the train of thought. Having put it down on paper it sounds exaggerated, like a mental game rather than serious existential crisis. The light of morning shall dispel all such frightening glimpses and I can go back to my familiar patterns.

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PS: We had Prof. Jagdish Bhagwati, the eminent economist from Columbia come in at work today. I was looking forward to it, but unfortunately it turned out to be us telling him about our work rather than a general discussion about globalization (about which he's written a book) or other interesting stuff.