"Learn from yesterday, live for today, hope for
tomorrow.”
Albert Einstein
Two
thousand and eleven feels like it will be remembered largely as the year in
which humanity’s integrity and honour fell by the wayside and everything in the
world seemed to be off kilter as a result of the great precipice created in our
world. It was a year filled with company destroying financial revelations,
country-crumbling debt crises, leadership failures and big economic
disappointments. It was a year when honesty and transparency seemed in short
supply, everywhere. Many of the revelations were sadly, not so much shocking as
simply removing the thin veil that barely hid what we already knew to be true
for some years now.
It was
also the year when some of the most oppressed people in the world stopped
fearing their governments and started to rectify this equation to finally make
government fear the people. The Arab street locked arms, raised voices, gave
lives, but in the end succeeded in striking down the tyrants that used fear,
torture and censorship to shackle them for decades. It was the year of the Arab
Spring or Awakening, as the longstanding and brutal dictatorships of Egypt,
Yemen, Libya and Tunisia all fell and the ones still left standing are on the
brink of revolution. All this ignited by a single act of frustrated defiance by
Mohamed Bouazizi, a fruit seller, on the streets of Tunisia. He set himself on
fire to protest police corruption and continuous harassment by government
employees, and his martyrdom set in motion a chain of events that the most
brilliant analytical minds at the CIA, Mossad and Pentagon had not foreseen in
any of the scenarios they have spent their lives exploring and building. There
were even simmers of discontent in China with the short-lived Jasmine protest
and now we are seeing it engulf mother Russia. Last weekend saw the largest
demonstrations held in the streets of Moscow and other cities since the fall of
the old Soviet Union. People came out in the hundreds of thousands to protest
voter fraud and demand the resignation of Vladimir Putin.
Meanwhile,
the great democracies of India and the US also saw their share of people power,
albeit without much turmoil or disruption so far. In India, Anna Hazare’s
movement to create Lokpal or citizen ombudsman bill to fight corruption was
passed by the Lower House this week and is currently being debated in the Upper
House. The bill was first introduced in 1968 but never managed to see light of
day. In the United States we saw the beginnings of a something that had all the
power and popular support to grow into a force with clout and sway. But sadly, Occupy
deteriorated into a homeless-filled, feckless orgy of sex, drugs and alcohol.
The day Occupy announced that it would be a leaderless movement is that day I
believe America stopped caring about them and went back to burying their frustration
in their office cubicles. However, the discontent with Capitol Hill and Wall
Street is not going away anytime soon. It will continue to fester across the
nation until some real and meaningful change takes place, and some real prison
sentences handed down for the fraud perpetrated by many executives.
Even as
the world seemed starved and desperate for leadership nobody was able to step
up to the plate and deliver. Instead it seemed the opposite was true with the
Former Israeli President, Moshe Katsav, being sentenced to seven years in
prison for raping a former employee while he was president. The former French
President, Chirac, was found guilty of corruption and given to a two-year
suspended prison sentence for diverting public funds and abusing public trust.
The head of the International Monetary Fund, Dominique Strauss-Kahn, had to
resign after he had sex with a New York hotel maid. His wife stoically stood by
him even as he admitted to having had consensual sex with the maid. Meanwhile
Europe was in turmoil with the constant fear of the impending disintegration of
the European Union and Euro zone hanging over the markets like a dark cloud for
the better part of the year. Every day we heard about another country on the
brink of default on their loans, from having lived beyond their means for more
than a decade. It was not just the smaller and developing economies of Iceland,
Ireland or Greece that faltered, but also the fully developed and large ones of
Italy and Spain that are teetering on the edge of that debt cliff. Had one of
these big countries gone it would have taken the whole Euro zone down with it.
They say that in the times of great crisis, great leaders emerge; I guess they got
it wrong. Instead of leadership and fortitude, we had Angela Merkel and Nicholas
Sarkozy pussyfooting around the problems, relying on German coffers to shoulder
Europe’s’ self-created woes, and finally asking private banks to write-off
loans and thus share the public burden. The one good thing that did come out of
this was that Silvio Berlusconi had to finally resign, giving the Italians a
fighting chance to keep their country alive with the “developed world” label
still intact. It is also true that while the US’s troubles are much deeper and
more worrying, the dollar was saved not by anything the US Federal Reserve or
the government did to shore up investor confidence, but by the fact that the
only other option – the Euro did a phenomenal job of making itself look worse
and even less secure than the weak dollar.
Back on
the sub-continent, Indians witnessed the uncovering of one scam after another. Dirty
politicians, unscrupulous businessmen, even corrupt officials in The Indian
Space Research Organization. Sadly even the once revered Indian army was not
left unsullied. Each new scam unearthed was bigger, more daring and conducted
with greater fearlessness and abandon than the last one; in the end leaving no
Indian institution unscathed. It seems that the ruling Congress Party had made
a decision to make hay while their electoral sun shone, and pretty much
everyone from Sonia Gandhi to the bottom layers of the party had their hand in
the taxpayer’s cookie jar. It was only after a prolonged public outcry, major
media coverage and really bad International press that a single arrest was
made. One has to wait and see how many years these cases drag on and if there
will ever be a single politician prosecuted for any wrongdoing. I still see all
the disgraced politicians smiling and looking shameless and plucky, as if they know
of enough skeletons in other closets to ever be prosecuted by their peers. We
shall see.
In
America, too, it was the year of uncovering scams pulled off by all the major
retail and investment banks, as well as unethical if not illegal business
practices by many large and iconic companies. Curiously, though, not a single
corporate executive was prosecuted or even indicted for this wrong doing.
Instead settlements were made with all the companies, forcing them to pay
seemingly large fines but also allowing them to admit “no wrongdoing.” Perhaps
I am a little slow but I don’t understand this logic – you commit a crime and
instead of prosecution you agree to pay a large sum of money; which happens to
be no more than 25% of the total amount you illegally and unethically made, and
you get to say you are not guilty of doing anything wrong – how exactly does
this serve as punishment and more importantly as a deterrent?
I guess
we could look back at two thousand and eleven and conclude that the Mayan
prophecy about twenty-first December two thousand and twelve being the end of
the world, could quite possibly be true. Talk to anybody and they will tell you
they think the world feels like it is going to hell faster than we can say the
word. I am sure every generation felt this sense of hopelessness and despair at
some point in their journey; what we also know is that each of these
generations managed to find a way through the Plague, Hitler, Hiroshima, Jallianwala Bagh and Apartheid. So while our world has
for some time now felt tilted towards the majority of people seemingly driven
entirely by selfishness, greed and unethical behaviour, I want to offer an alternative
point of view on the Mayan prophecy. This prophecy maybe correct about the end,
but not in terms of the four horsemen or fire, brimstone and volcanic ash, but
as an end to a chapter. Perhaps this year will mark a new beginning, closing
this long and dark chapter of unethical behavior, lack of regard for our fellow
human beings and the selfish rot that seems to have overtaken the majority of people
and begin to shift the balance back. Maybe we have sunk to our depths and it is
time to rise once again; finding within us the very same things that have made
us more united and more connected than ever before in the history of the world.
The same kindness and compassion of neighbours that saw America through the
Great Depression, the solidarity and selfless resolve that drove the mighty British out of India and a strength and never say die resolve that ended Apartheid.
Perhaps this is what the Mayan Prophecy foretells and for what two thousand and
twelve will be remembered.