A decade - definitely not lost

There is no such thing as a ‘dull decade’. The arc of history is long—to maul a line by my local Atlanta hero, Dr. Martin Luther King—and it bends toward stuff happening. It’s a natural human tendency to give special attention to things close-by – be it times, places or people. Having acknowledged this, I still feel the past decade deserves a mention on the Right Experience, and this topic will hopefully lead to my re-entry as well as continued touch with the blogosphere.

There are decades when a few earthquakes shuffle the terrain and jostle the nerves—and then there are decades when the world splits open to the boiling core and remakes itself. Maybe after a generation or two have passed, the events of the 21st century’s first 10 years will recede in significance. With time, perhaps 9/11 will go back to being just another day in September. It sure seems unlikely from here. Indeed, the 10-year period beginning in 2000 has been marked by a string of colossal events that, in any other decade, would have been the undisputed story of their time. It has been a dazing and bedazzling era, almost biblical in its bookending events: the tragedy of 9/11 and the election of America’s first black president—a man whose name meant nothing to anyone outside of politics until just a few years before his ascension to the most powerful office in the world. Just think: Cataclysmic Tsunami—a catastrophe so vast it nearly wiped several cities off the map of the world—rates a distant, even debatable, third among this decade’s biggest headlines. Two ongoing wars, a global financial collapse, Hurricane Katrina, Mumbai 26/11, Gujarat riots… the list goes on and on.

The decade had its fair share of pleasant and gloomy times, almost looks like it had everything. The one thing this decade hasn’t had, oddly, is a name. People could never seem to agree on one. Is it the Double-Zeroes? The Oh-Ohs? The 2K’s? I even remember seeing at least five different ways of writing a date in 2000s. But well, it shouldn’t matter, except that it’s hard to wrap your arms around something when you don’t even know what to call it. “The ‘50s,” “the ‘60s” - the terms conjure a specific, albeit oversimplified, portrait of those eras in different nations. But perhaps it’s fitting that this decade should remain stubbornly absent a name. It’s been too vast, too shocking and too transformative, for just one.

And in any case, a decade or a year for that matter is just an empty unit of time, arbitrarily walling off of events that exist both within and beyond them. When we get close to the end of a year or a decade, it’s mere use is to be indulged in one’s favorite past-times: Looking backward and dreaming forward. With wishes that every ‘good’ dream seen by all the six billion eye-pairs turn into reality, here is wishing everyone a happy and a healthy new decade. Prosperous, who really knows? :)