Que Será, Será

Que Sera, Sera (What will be, will be) is a song from the 1956 Hitchcock movie, The Man Who Knew Too Much. As a child, the singer asked her mother what she would be? Would she be pretty and rich? And mother’s reply was: Que sera, sera. The future’s not ours to see, she added. When the girl grew up and became a young woman, she repeated the question with a slight change to her sweetheart and the reply was the same. Once again, the question is repeated. This time it comes from her children. And she gives them too the same answer.

This song has started playing again and again in my mind these days. I imagine a girl who is not so little – let’s call her Sara – and who is not quite happy with that answer.

“Imagine those two little kids in the Kiev flat, left there by their 20-year-old mother for nine days without food and one of whom died,” Sara tells me with tears welling up in her eyes.

Sara has a genuine concern about our world. “What will be is what we make it to be,” she tells me vehemently. Why did Russia do this to hundreds of thousands of people? Should those hundreds of thousands just sit looking at the ruins of their lives consoling themselves singing “Que sera, sera”?

The images of people staring in frustration at the debris of their bombarded houses rise in my mind. Haven’t we been doing this to each other all the time? I wonder. Look at the 20^th century. Two World Wars. And so many other smaller wars and acts of terrorism and violence. It was also the best century in many other ways. The best of times and the worst of times, Dickens would have said. It was born in hope but developed in disaster. There was so much creativity, effort, technical resourcefulness, more freedom than ever, more human rights… But also the most destructive wars, most inhuman massacres, gaping extremes of wealth and poverty, foulest environmental degradation, the most trash, the cruellest disillusionment. It promised much and betrayed more.*

Did the 20^th century sustain the philosophy of Que sera, sera? Or did it mock it?

Sara reminds me of what is happening in our own neighbourhood: Sri Lanka, Nepal and Pakistan. Are we far from a similar fate? Sara asks me with sorrow in her deep dark eyes. She advises me to check my accounts. What I spend on petrol these days, for example. On grocery and other necessary items. “Isn’t that how it all started in Sri Lanka too?”

The future is ours to see, Sara tells me. If only we care to open our eyes. Look at our leaders who are all blinded by hatred. Sara cites example after example. Sadhvi Ritambhara tells Hindus to have four children, two of whom should be given to RSS or Bajrang Dal. A Dalit boy is assaulted and forced to lick the feet of people who call themselves Thakurs in a state governed by an ascetic whose heart is filled with poison. A Dalit woman-journalist is abused, threatened with death for questioning the Manusmriti.

Sara’s list is long, too long.

I hold her close to me. I have no words to answer her questions. I am left with nothing more than this gentle hug, Sara, which just means that I am with you. That’s all. I am with you in this.

* These lines are adapted from the book, Civilizations, by Felipe Fernandez-Armesto.

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