Information overload — that’s what defines our era. The excess might leave you catatonic at the end of the day, but it’s a small price to pay to stay connected.With obscure factoids floating around in our heads, is it any wonder that we’re tuned out most of the time? We’re vaguer than ever, attention spans are growing shorter and I’m not sure why, but that’s not a good thing.Take the most catastrophic natural calamity of recent times. People who had never heard the word tsunami till a month ago are now rattling off mind-boggling statistics, like they have an inside connection.But does knowing that at least 1,56,000 people were killed preclude the need for a deeper understanding? It certainly threatens to drown out compassion, especially when the conversation veers from the death and destruction to the other ‘‘hot’’ news of the day: that Hollywood’s most charming couple have split up.Ok, so we’re ‘‘desensitised’’. That’s another innocuous word that covers up for us — what does it mean? That just because we’re exposed to brutal images and vivid imagery, we’re entitled to lose sight of the essence? How sad is that? Militancy in Kashmir? Oh, what else is new? Hatred and violence in the Middle East? We just fade out after a point. We don’t get it. We can’t get what it means to lose everything until we feel it firsthand, until someone we know goes through something gut-wrenching. And even then we usually can’t do much more than make the right sounds and gestures or try and articulate something, anything.In a world gone horribly wrong, where it’s usually mankind that unleashes the dragons of destruction, I think some of us have just realised that we’re truly tiny in the bigger scheme of things.So, hundreds of thousands of people have just had their lives cut short or ruined. They have cried, bled, lost, but have to soldier on nevertheless. Who can get around that? How do you get over it? It’s not some academic topic that doesn’t affect our lives. But, of course, that’s the benefit of being upwardly mobile city-dwellers. How many of us are the fisherfolk who bore the brunt? Or tourists in exotic locales? Or defenceless children?What’s my problem? I should just take out the cheque book, say the right things, get on with life. But who can resist discussing the topic of the hour? Why do I keep getting the sinking feeling that most of us are missing the point entirely?
