Making today better than yesterday

I’m unsure if Yesterday, Today, and Tomorrow are brothers but they certainly hang out together in the pub where only time cocktails are served. This may sound rather mundane, boring, and repetitive but it is not. The three, I believe, are just data collectors who neither create nor act on anything, smartly stay away from accountability and responsibility, and funnily do not lead target-bound or time-bound lives. In fact, I suspect they don’t live at all, except in over-ripe imaginations.

Some of us assume that Yesterday is factual and comes laden with statistics and information bits that may be used to complete the jigsaw puzzle of life. Does it really? But look at the debates over every little incident that happened in the past and you will know how ineffective is the way that Yesterday guards its truth. Hundreds of people from Bose to Bruce Lee and hundreds of incidents from the murder of Arushi to what really happened at Uri remain, at best, unsolved enigmas. Yesterday is like form changing illusion that forces interpretations to digress, meander, and sometimes be outright crazy expressions. I have known this fellow to smile and frown at the same moment leaving me completely foxed as well as disillusioned. The truth is that each of us has an intimate relationship with Yesterday and yet every time we turn to it for support, it hands us a different set of data for one specific point in time. It is almost like every moment being filmed from multiple angles and poor Yesterday just dips its hands into its filing system and pulls out whatever it manages to clutch when asked to. This is similar to what people mean when they talk about multiple interpretations of religious texts. This is like a number of cameras set around a monument to click at the same moment… and what we get to see is a myriad display of the infinite range of the play of light and dark and subtly differing hues. An interpretation is far more mind-boggling than the spelling of the word. Sometimes I am convinced that Yesterday is actually truth playing games where fantasy, fictional ingresses, and non-fiction bits remain in a permanent state of random permutations and combinations.

Yesterday is history… and I mean this literally. It forever exists in text references that Today refers to and, therefore, there will always be a queue of distractors, detractors, dissuaders, and dissenters besides the ones who are thoroughly confused or want to force in a point to prove or have an axe to grind wanting their subliminal dactylogram or mental fingerprint to travel to their tomorrow. Look at the recent hullaballoo that Bloomsbury India is surrounded with. According to a report published in Live Mint, ‘Monika Arora, one of the authors of Delhi Riots 2020, blamed “leftist-fascists” for applying pressure on the publisher, and one web portal and a few commentators (including Agnihotri) zeroed in on William Dalrymple, whose books Bloomsbury has published, implying that a few authors on Bloomsbury’s list (including Dalrymple) had instigated the publisher’s parent to act. The book will appear; another publisher, Garuda Prakashan, has stepped in.’ The two books being compared are ‘Delhi Riots 2020 – the untold story’ and ‘Shaheen Bagh – from a protest to a movement’ and both have allegedly taken a different stance of what happened at Shaheen Bagh and later. Obviously then, it is the story of Yesterday that is being tossed around and this is how we treat what could have happened some day that was once Today. Tomorrow is mercilessly dragged in every big and small conflict as Yesterday loves influencing Today and Tomorrow.

The question then is if Today can ever be better than Yesterday because we learn from Yesterday and hope for Tomorrow, as Einstein wrote and then went on to say that ‘the important thing is not to stop questioning’. It is only questions that have the power to dissuade distortions from dictating their terms any day.

The only way Today can be better than Yesterday is for us to let questions and the spirit of questioning stay on. I have always imagined questions to be like a sieve that painstakingly separates fattened lies from truth that has already gone through the grinder of time. And yes, there are no right or wrong questions ever… because right answers never die. Right answers live on until someone stumbles upon them. This is why I have no problem with Yesterday, Today, and Tomorrow going on collecting good, bad, and ugly data as it is their job to do just that.

Reference:

News report published in Live Mint: https://www.livemint.com/mint-lounge/features/bloomsbury-india-s-refusal-to-publish-delhi-riots-2020-doesn-t-amount-to-a-ban-11598239449689.html

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Note: First published in Education Post – September 2020

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Arvind Passey
Written on 24 August 2020