I recently received an email from an uncle containing an essay written by King Abdullah the First published in The American Magazine in November 1947 disputing the mistaken view that Arab opposition to Zionism was a result of years of culturally procreated hatred. I actually beheld a few valid points and would like to single out the economic saturation point which the country was frighteningly reaching, but behind the veil of civilized detailed reasoning lingered a terrible territorial disquiet, a visceral instinct which supplanted Transjordan’s financial drawbacks as the monarch’s paramount reason for resistance, i.e. the fear of losing the country’s Arab identity to the Jewish immigrants.
Renowned psychologist Dr. Paul Ekman (inspiration behind hit TV show ‘Lie to Me’) classifies fear as one of the seven basic emotions with universal signals. What is fear? Does it wiggle its way through the magnificent sand dune of emotions that man possesses or does it brood with its roc-like wings and act like a mental pituitary gland?
‘To be on the safer side’ is a phrase that has furtively found its way into the diurnal lingo of the average human being. About a few years ago there was an incident where a gentleman, well-read beyond the furthest horizon, married his son to a tree and then to the son’s girlfriend of ages as he found out that the ‘girl of his son’s dreams’ was maanglik, an Indian superstition punished by ridicule in this day and age and which this afore mentioned person would have unequivocally scoffed at ‘til the day it innocently waltzed into his house. A man in Florida who held a perfect record with no complaints in his six year tenure in the police force, was asked to resign after he was found introducing a song for Vital Remains, a band with musical proclivities towards death metal which is infamous for its inclinations towards violence and the occult, which in my humble opinion is analogous to arresting a man on battery charges because he watched a Chuck Norris movie. Fear has engendered war, made the most rational of men encounter unspeakable phantasms and owing to the severity of British imperialism, is the reason why a village simpleton goes weak in the knees while holding colloquy with a far physically (sometimes even mentally) inferior English speaking city snoot.
People react in different ways and exhibit the most bizarre of vagaries when their worst fears come to pass. I angrily recollect the pointless hullabaloo generated from Anushka Sharma’s presence in the stadium in 2015 during the ICC Cricket World Cup held in Melbourne, Australia. In a country filled with unimaginative misogynists where cricket is religion, people were looking for a reason to point fingers at anything and everything that got in the way of the progress of their beloved ‘Men in Blue’. Certain degenerates feared for the Indian cricket team, could not digest the fact that India lost a chance to lift the trophy thrice and began to search for a reason to justify their loss, which they found in the quintessential man eating oppressor who they crucified without examining the sheer dim-wittedness of their reasoning or the fact that cricket is a team game with eleven people and not one person contributing to a team’s success ( I am going to be generous over here and give them the benefit of the doubt that Virat Kohli was indeed distracted by his alleged girlfriend whilst playing the most important match of his life).
I have seen people, sometimes even the staunchest of non-believers, resort to prayer during troubled times and elevate an entity which they debased for the better part of their lives to a pedestal of titanic significance. If not fear, what else is that? Why are religious people called ‘God fearing’ and not ‘God loving’ or ‘God adoring’?
A recurrence with respect to cancer treatment is an event where the disease resurfaces in spite of it initially responding to chemotherapy, which is what happened in my case. I proceeded to have three bone marrow transplants which were extremely successful and my tumor became completely benign, but the doctors advised me to hold my horses as chances of a recurrence happening were extremely high in the next one year and that only one in three people got completely cured. The possibilities of a third battle with cancer began to haunt me unceasingly. I used to pace the length of my corridor with my mind sojourning through limitless abysses and conjuring the most horrifying possibilities which was given further impetus by my mother’s inexplicable eccentricities.
My mother’s maternal instincts understandably subdued her scientific reasoning and she started bombarding me with lectures on things which I should avoid as they caused cancer according to her skewed anxiety-driven research. I remember her asking me one day to stop going to the gym as she felt that exercise, something which every doctor recommends, was not good for me.
Fear causes people to relapse back in time and embrace bigotry without thinking once about the stain that it leaves on their moral character. US Presidential candidates Jeb Bush and Ted Cruz wanted to create an appropriate screening process for the Syrian refugees to filter the Christians out and welcome them with open arms into the US as they were not willing to accept Muslims with a Middle Eastern background and more importantly the Christians are a tribe who they associate with. It is an emotion which will always exercise control over the world and sometimes even inspires awe in us. Why do you think the public always embraces the villain over the hero? Darth Vader, The Joker, Gabbar Singh, Mogambo….. need I say more?
Rohan Thomas is an electrical engineer by profession and a writer on the side. He was diagnosed with cancer at the age of 24 and has managed to kick this disease in the face
