War, fiction and time

There’s a scene in the first 15 minutes of Dunkirk where a large gathering of British soldiers, awaiting their return journey home from the shore of Dunkirk, hear the sounds of German bomber airplanes and hurriedly cower on the shoreline, covering their heads under their arms. Bombs begin raining down from the sky and as they explode one after another, we see sand and arms and legs and heads getting scattered.

For a moment, I imagined myself lying on the shoreline, amidst the bombings. 

Would I have been patriotic then? Would I have still stuck to my atheistic opinions? Would I have agonized over my life possibly ending because of the fight between egotistical men in power? Would I have wished that my end happened in a flash? Would I have died of the sheer anticipation of a bomb that would blow my body to pieces?

The chaos continued on screen as a different chaos erupted in my head.

I asked myself if I would enlist to serve the army, if a war broke out. The response was a feeble ‘No’. 

Am I a coward for wanting to be by the side of my loved ones as the end approached, instead of being on a foreign battlefield? Am I a coward for wanting to be beside groups of children, wanting to stop the theft of their childhood by war, instead of being beside men who are forced to let go of the humanity in them? Am I a coward for wanting to record the horrendous happenings common people are subjected to, thanks to them being born within this border or that, and wanting to let the records out for the future generations to learn the extent of man’s insanity? Am I a coward for wanting to live?

There is a scene in Dunkirk where the characters of Tommy and Gibson use a wounded soldier to their benefit, trying to gain access to a ship by pretending to be medical men. Though their actions put a weak smile on my face, deep down I realized the cost of survival.

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Victor Frankl writes in his severely haunting Man’s Search for Meaning,
“It is a peculiarity of man that he can only live by looking to the future – subspecie aeternitatis. And this is his salvation in the most difficult moments of his existence, although he sometimes has to force his mind to the task.”

In Dunkirk, more than once, it is referred that the British soldiers could practically see their home from the shoreline. I wonder if the soldiers would have gotten the will to survive the deadly onslaughts one after the other, if they had not had their home within their sight. I wonder if an alternate outcome would have resulted had this happened in a shore thousands of miles from the British mainland.

Neitzsche also comes to mind – “He who has a why to live for can bear almost any how.”

A happier home. A lasting love. A pleasurable pursuit of a passion. 
Thinking about a man’s why shows man’s fondness for fiction. What is a man’s future if not fiction?

As Yuval Noah Harari points out in his TED talk, man would have been unable to rule planet Earth if not for his belief in fiction.
The fiction of religions. The fiction of nations. The fiction of wars. The fiction of money. The fiction of time.

Is there another filmmaker today who is as obsessed with the concept of time as Christopher Nolan is?

Memento dealt with a man’s quest for revenge, revolving around his time-bound memory disorder. The Prestige dealt with the rivalry between two magicians, but deceived the audience by crisscrossing timelines. Inception had its final act structured around a multi-layered dream sequence, heightened in its intensity by the time differences across each layer. Interstellar had a father-daughter relationship being shaken at its roots by the time differences owing to space travel. And in Dunkirk, we literally feel the dread of every passing second, thanks to its background score and crisscrossed timelines.

What does Nolan find fascinating about the concept of time? 

Our never-ending fight against it? The varying storylines that pop out of alternated timelines? The changing cycles of cause and effect?

Whatever Nolan’s reason(s) might be, when one begins to consider the cause and effect of war, one cannot help but feel sorry for mankind.

Where there is no way...

Whenever I stepped into the Chennai Mofussil Bus Terminus on Sunday nights, the heart would get heavy for two reasons.

• The feeling of leaving behind a home and a Metropolitan that get closer in 2 days than a flat and a city that stay together for 28 days 
• The sight of countless old, destitute men and women 

In the 20 minute spare time that I would always gift myself with, before my bus ride to Bangalore, I would seat myself by a corner and look around the terminus. People would rush with their baggage and babies to board buses scheduled to leave 10 minutes earlier. People would rush with their baggage and babies, having deboarded from buses that were scheduled to arrive an hour earlier. And amidst this wave of incoming and outgoing people, who would always have a destination to reach, one that would be different from the one in their hearts, seated or sleeping would be a large group of men and women with no destination to travel and reside. These people also possess their own baggage, but more on their minds than the ones below their heads and beside their bodies.

Strangely or perhaps not, a line from the Tamil song 'Vidai kodu engal naadae' comes to mind.
"Thalaiyil konjam, nenjil athigam, sumaigal sumanthu pogindrom."
A line used to describe the Sri Lankan Tamils, many of whom were forced to become refugees, seems appropriate even for the men and women who carry no bus tickets inside the terminus.

At times, as I would survey this group of men and women, certain people would grab my attention. Like a 50-60 year old man, who I noticed during 3 of my visits, constantly reading a newspaper. Like a happy old couple lost in conversation and time. Like a very old woman with a smile glued to her face.
I would wonder about the cause for their destination being the terminus.
Death of the last remaining family member? Ignorance of every remaining family member? Lack of a proper financial planning for their old age when they were young? Globalization? Urbanization?

An article that I came across some time ago explained the adverse effects that globalization, through its creation of nuclear families, was projecting on the older Indian population. Which made me ponder upon the plight of numerous old fathers and mothers, who suffered not from lack of money but from lack of care. With sons and daughters working in faraway cities, with ambitious loans resting comfortably at their backyards, with brothers and sisters scattered owing to corporate convenience, these fathers and mothers do not seem to lack a destination but just a proper home, unlike the earlier group who have neither.

I wonder why the destitute men and women choose a bus terminus as their home. Maybe for the easy access to food and washrooms. Maybe in wait of the day when they would get a destination to board a bus to. Maybe to serve as reminders for the sons and daughters, who travel to their hometowns once/twice/thrice a month, of the state of a lonely parent.

As these thoughts flood my mind, I silently walk to the bedroom where my mother is sound asleep. I had felt happy that I had made my mother shift from my native city to my work city in just 2 years since I started working. But with these thoughts, the 2 years make me experience a sense of guilt. I just whisper 'Sorry' and exit the bedroom, realizing that it would never suffice, neither for the 2 years nor for the countless old, destitute men and women at the Chennai Mofussil Bus Terminus.