I watched Steven Spielberg’s ‘Saving Private Ryan’ today. It wasn’t for the first time that I had watched it. And it also wasn’t because I am fond of movies of such genre. The fact is that for some time now I have been feeling like an alien on our planet. That is to say, I have been utterly unable to accept some trends prevalent in our society, for e.g. a non-controversial acceptance of the competitive nature of disciplines which are fundamental to a person’s survival and balanced mental and physical health, or the establishment of a selfish and socially destructive structure in which only a few have a very high chance of ‘success’ (a definition which is also non-controversially and blindly accepted) whereas the majority doesn't and that the ones who are ‘successful’ are adulated and act as beacons for the ‘budding’ ones in the guise of apt embodiments of courage, hard-work, will-power and other such beguiling passions while, perhaps inadvertently, making the vast majority of them ignorant of the broad negative social ramifications of this structure. Anyway, I won’t belabor on these things because what I want to share is not something as negative as my previous statement and is in fact something optimistic, a word which has lately been losing its significance to me as far as the direction of progress of our species is concerned.
I watched ‘Saving Private Ryan’ because I hopelessly wanted to have some source of entertainment to shut the rebellious voices inside my head whose frequency has lately increased, and to have a good night’s sleep. Watching war movies about 3 years back had been entertaining and I hopelessly thought it might work for me this time. There have been some drastic changes in my perspectives between now and then and I found it evident while watching the movie. I am assuming the reader would have seen it, or least would be aware of the movie’s plot.
From the movie’s start till the finish, I wasn’t entertained and it was not because I had watched it a couple of times before. It was because how meaningless and painful I thought it was for people to die in a way that was absolutely unnecessary if the conditions of the world at that point of time had been like the present one, if the values of society at that time had been against the notion that failure of the political understanding between some countries makes it necessary for the citizens of those countries to retaliate and kill each other even though they do not know who they are fighting with and what is the fault of the ones they are fighting with or that obeying orders against one's own conscience is right. Or if majority of humans had tried to re-consider the concept of a ‘nation’ and found it silly after looking at earth on a galactic scale.
Thankfully, I was able to get at least something useful out of the movie apart from my observations of instances of typical working of human psychology in that particular setting. The ending scene of the movie reminded me of some ‘morals’ which I had fondly valued some time back but had lately been undervaluing probably due to my disgust with the prevailing nonsensical world affairs. In the movie, just before Tom Hanks is about to die, he tells Matt Damon ‘Earn this… Earn it.’ And years after that incident when Matt is an old man, he still remembers those words and in fact seems to have made his best endeavors in living a righteous and good life.
Maybe many of us share such feelings or would be led to have them when we think of the martyrs who sacrificed themselves for India’s freedom. Personally, I have a hard time finding a causative relation between desiring to live a righteous life and our history of struggle for independence. I feel the whole chapter of the British rule of our country is as insane as the domination of other countries by other imperialist powers and that whatever bloodshed that occurred in an effort to gain 'freedom' was something which is painful to look at now, and which wouldn’t have happened had there been no incentive in pursuit of a shitty objective of acquiring more and more power by invading territories. I guess it’s a sensitive topic, so I won’t express any more opinions on that. I think we are very lucky to be alive and live in a comparatively less insane world, though it’s not the kind of motivation that makes me want to live a righteous and good life.
What struck me as I watched Tom Hanks telling Matt to ‘earn’ his rescue at the cost of death of many soldiers was that perhaps those of us lucky to be born in conditions conducive to our good mental and physical health need to start thinking of those who weren’t so lucky. That maybe to ‘earn’ our privileges in a system which has resulted in a highly disproportionate access of basic human needs, what to say of the comforts which many of us enjoy, we need to share a sense of responsibility towards making those privileges accessible to as many other less-fortunate people as possible. Meaning in an apparently meaningless nature of existence is logically created by us humans only. Our joys and sorrows, our hopes and fears, our successes and failures, all seem to be circumscribed by our own feeble minds, our own methods of evaluation or judgment. To me this is an empirical evidence of how we humans are all equal to begin with and that all the differences are just inventions or by-products of the kind of environmental conditioning that takes place as we grow. Some of those differences have led to suffering of large populations of humans, not to mention its dire consequences on our planet’s ecology, something that I find hard to tolerate and accept, especially when we humans can do much much better with our state-of-the-art technology and insightful studies on human behavior, backed by a depressing history of human affairs which, ironically, has a lot of lessons to offer. In case you share a similar spirit, feel free to contact me.
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