The End of the World

Marine Drive in those good old days [Times of India]

I was sitting in the Subash Chandra Bose Park when someone announced the end of the world on a blaring loudspeaker. “Repent and make amends,” the speaker was admonishing. The world was going to end soon, according to him.

He is one of the myriad religious preachers in Kerala who harp on the theme of apocalypse for various motives the dominant of which is money. Religion is one of the easiest means for making money and the end of the world is a powerful theme. No less a person than Jesus predicted the imminent end of the world 2000 years ago. Not only did the world not end, but the evils that Jesus was trying to bring to an end multiplied in geometric progression. Jesus became a god and the world went on with its usual business.

I was thinking of the many apocalyptic predictions like the Mayan calendar and the Halley’s Comet panic when someone stood in front of me calling my name. It was Henry, my classmate at St Albert’s College in the early 1980s. We were now meeting after many years since he was working in another faraway city.

In those days of our college life, Cochin (today’s Kochi) was far more humane in spite of the elephantine mosquitoes that cohabited with humans in a rare symbiotic relationship. The air was eminently breathable despite its heavy salt tang and no preacher of apocalypse would have found it easy to capture the psychedelic fancies of the denizens.

“Remember the Marine Drive of those days?” Henry asked me.

How could I forget? Henry and I used to walk on those golden sands in the evenings enjoying the gentle breeze from the Arabian Ocean. Today the sandbar doesn’t exist. In its place stand high-rise buildings blocking the cold breeze of the sea. The Kochi city stinks today of putrid waste and smothering chemicals.

“The end of the world may be actually close,” Henry said. “What began with a bang will end with a whimper.”

“Perhaps, the end is good. Something better may begin anew,” I said.

Unless the grain of wheat falls in the ground and rots, will there be new life? The apocalypse man was asking.

We sat in silence for a while. Only we were silent. The city is never silent. Apocalypse continued to flow from the loudspeaker drowning the noise of the traffic and the usual bustle of the city.

“You know, Henry,” I said. “There’s one thought that comes to my mind again and again these days.”

“Some perverse thought, I’m sure,” he said with his characteristic laugh. He was always convinced that I was a pervert.

“When I die, that will be the end of the world for me. But the world will carry on as usual. As if nothing has happened. As if I mattered nothing to anyone.”

“Nothing matters. No matter,” Henry said. “That’s what the Buddha called Nirvana. Be happy.”