We live in a bhuta-kaala. Forget the jazzy self-images of the 21st century. We actually live in a tired century that belongs to bhuta in both senses of the word — past age and time of ghosts. We are living inside the haunted ruins of a building meant for a different age and another part of the world that we still mistake for our house. Every day, a manmade disaster appears on our timeline — destruction in Nepal, genocide in Gaza or the tantrums of Donald Trump — and reminds us that the grand designs that continue to rule us have mutated into bhutas, grotesque inversions of what they were meant to achieve. We need to be saved from the ideas that were meant to save us.

About two centuries ago, Alexis de Tocqueville described his predicament thus: “I find no parallel to what is occurring before my eyes; since the past has ceased to throw its light upon the future, the mind of man wanders in obscurity.” We are in a similar spot, in between two worlds — one that is dead and another yet to be born. Except that we insist on carrying the cursed old furniture to the new world. Europe’s past and America’s present have ceased to throw light upon our future. Western modernity is stale. It stinks. Yet we dress it up daily to serve to our children.

Take democracy, that charming ideal of realising every human being’s quest for self-rule. The revolutionary idea of the last century has by now turned into a standardised global template called liberal democracy. The idea of popular sovereignty has been translated into representative government based on majority rule through competitive elections. In our collective struggle........

© Indian Express