The corridor of uncertainty

There is always that bizarre feeling that something bad is going to happen, that somewhere a revolt is fomenting.

Occasionally, I relapse into a world of my own and indulge in a little bit of reminiscing. As I get older, I begin to remember things that happened to me as a child, but I can’t recall what I ate for lunch last Tuesday or who had borrowed my book on the Aztecs of Mexico and never returned it. A case in point is the dream I had when I was strapped to a chair in a clinic in Berlin and my tonsils were about to be removed by a surgeon who must have been a close relative of the chap who played Dracula in those British Hammer horror films. Of course this episode took place after a detailed verbal duel in the Berlin dialect on who was in charge of the operating theatre: the doctor or the patient? I was then five years old. But I had already developed rigid ideas of proprietary rights over my own organs.

The medical man won as he was the chap with the chloroform. Getting back to the dream, I saw a field with knee-deep water in which a number of telegraph poles were moving about aimlessly in no particular order, rather like dodgem cars in a children’s amusement park. The poles would approach me one at a time, grow in size and importance, and then shrink and retreat into the dim background. Years later, I wondered if the dream was some kind of omen and if the telegraph poles represented different countries, races or religions, or just metaphysical ideas that had been and still were being propounded. Perhaps it indicated a perpetual transition with menacing undertones that had no beginning, middle or end. Or just a sign of things to come.

Look at what is happening in the world these days. Syria, Egypt, Ukraine, the Sudan, Nigeria, Iraq, Thailand, Afghanistan and Pakistan are in turmoil. There has even been a bomb blast in the land of the pirates –– Somalia. India is also having her share of problems. Saudi Arabia is continuing to fight Iran on Pakistani soil while our government looks the other way. There are allegations of corruption against the prime minister of Turkey. Protesters in Thailand are doing everything they can to ensure their government does not function and in the process are destroying the vibrant tourist industry.

A few countries in the EU had gone under and had to be bailed out. Parts of southwest England has had unprecedented floods, which have turned cities into vast lakes and caused huge financial losses. Australia has been receiving its usual seasonal spell of forest fires, which appear to be getting worse every year. And Beijing has been enveloped in a thick haze of polluted air that is making life in the metropolis unbearable and dangerous. Those who have a yen for this sort of thing should watch CNN, where an astute weather man by means of a coloured graph demonstrates the hazards involved if pollution levels descend from pea green to carrot orange to beetroot red. In parts of Asia and Africa, serfdom still exists, wide swaths of the world’s population are living below the poverty line and there doesn’t appear to be any way out of the dilemma. Industrialists are dumping toxic materials into rivers. And to top it all, we all seem to be living in the corridor of uncertainty. There is always that bizarre feeling that something bad is going to happen, that somewhere or other a revolt is fomenting. I desperately hope I am wrong.

Published in The Express Tribune, March 2^nd, 2014.

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