Hello Dear Readers,
This week, I completed all the pending items on my daily roster. As you would guess, it is time to start my next set of activities, which includes the second round of edits to my novel. Actually, I am late by a couple of days, per my timeline. But we always have a Monday to restart all things procrastinated.
The series Lost became a convoluted and unwieldy plot by the fifth season. I was eager to see how they pulled off. As a writer, I would say that they barely managed with an inexplicable supernatural plot twist. Remember, the series started off as science fiction. The show’s writers entwined so many sub-plots that, in the end, it looked like an unsolvable tangle from a game of Twister. So, they did what we all do in times of distress — look for divine intervention.
There are several theories online to explain the ending. I don’t want to share them here lest it lead to spoilers.
As an audience, though, I liked the series and wished for more. The beauty of science fiction is when it deals with existential issues, and Lost deals with plenty of those. The characters come alive when they seem vulnerable with their myriad flaws. There is no perfect person among the crash survivors, which makes the series so endearing. It, apparently, revolutionised the television industry when it aired between 2004 and 2010. The fans were so invested that numerous discussion forums and podcasts emerged to discuss the plot’s many twists. I was a B-School student when it first aired, and I had no clue about it.
Discovering a top-rated series twenty years after it was released is fun.
I finished my Coursera course on Circular Economy, a field I have been interested in for the past few years. You can read my gist of why I took the course and what its best aspect is on LinkedIn.
Coming to my reading updates — I wouldn’t have picked up Brave New World if I had known its ending. But I read the whole thing and was blown away by what Aldous Huxley could imagine in 1931 when he wrote the novel.
If you think of it from the perspective of global changes, nothing much has changed, yet many things have. The interesting thing is that the impact remains the same. As a civilisation, we have undergone societal, political, technological, and economic changes. The effect on an individual that Aldous Huxley depicts in Brave New World remains the same today as he wrote in 1931.
Let me explain.
Huxley writes about a dystopian world governed by capitalism and consumerism.
The family as a unit is nonexistent. Children are not born naturally but are created in the lab and are designed to fit into various intelligence levels or castes to support various jobs.
The castes are conveniently labelled as Alpha, Beta, Gamma, Delta, Epsilon, etc., to segregate and easily identify. (Sounds familiar?)
All the individuals belonging to a caste look the same. (Does it remind you of the cliches and generalisations we use while describing people of different communities in the modern world?)
And so, there are no individuals and no individualism. The herd is driven by a need to consume more, and the children are taught propaganda right from birth through sleep-teaching methods.
With me so far?
The members of this dystopian world rely on a weird drug named ‘soma’ (I find it convenient that the author chose the name of a distilled ritual drink from the Vedic traditions to disguise abusive substances) to forget their unwanted thoughts, desires, worries or concerns. Ageing is not an issue, so the anxiety of death is irrelevant.
I would relate the ‘soma’ in the novel to social media. Does it heal or intoxicate? Does it provide succour or drug you into believing everything’s fine or wrong in this world, depending on your outlook?
The ‘Soma’ in the novel takes the people away from the present. Just like mobile phones and social media take us away from the present.
The worst thing about Huxley’s dystopian world is that no books exist. Eek!
I don’t want to spoil it for those who want to read the novel, so I will make no more comments about the story, except that it was eerily strange and yet familiar.
The book was banned in several countries at the time of publication for various reasons, including the author’s moral depravity. So, the book also poses the question of separating the art from the artist.
Overall, it is a challenging book for an evening tete-a-tete on the state of the world that can be forgotten the next day with a swig of ‘soma,’ perhaps.
Science fiction forces you to ponder on whether truth is stranger than fiction.
I want to move on to lighter stuff after Huxley’s book.
Unfortunately, my writing motivation is stuck like a needle on a broken record. So, bear with me as I share an allegorical story about two towns in my latest weekend short story.
When I lamented about how I could not write about anything else, my daughter suggested that I let it all out before moving on to other things. Well, that’s what writing is all about, isn’t it?
I wish you a lovely weekend and week ahead, readers! Keep reading and be at peace.
Sudeepa