Why does one feel dissatisfied with things as they are? Why do things look rosier when looked at from a distance? One of the reasons is that things that recede lose their immediacy, become less pressing and thus seem no longer threatening.

With the passage of time things acquire a patina of pleasant familiarity as their edginess gets softened when they are pushed to a safe distance from us. Irretrievability of what has happened creates an aura of romance at imaginative level. Secondly, remembrance of the things past juxtaposed with the things present makes it difficult for us to comfortably accept the present situation which confronts us and needs a solution. Dealing with the things present cannot be postponed and even if we are able to do so they have consequences for us. Nothing is painless; neither dealing with things nor postponing the action. This is because the present is more complex than the past as it has in its innards not only what has happened but also what’s going to happen that is not fully predictable.

The present can be more than just an aggregate of what happened in the past. Thus a greater degree of knowledge, skill and mental and intellectual labour is required to come up to a level that would enable us to meet with success in our dealing with what the present sets up. Complexity of the troubled and troubling human condition is largely responsible for the attitudes we have towards what was and what is in our life. ‘Was’ of our life creates nostalgia and ‘is’ creates anxiety. We remember or hear our elders remember things as they were; simple. Life was indeed simple. Anybody could manage their things. Simplicity required simple management. This is how they indulged in their reverie. People cared for one another. Community instinct was strong. It was a scene of shared joys and shared sorrows. Of course it was but you forget its flip side. It would take you weeks to reach Arabia for Haj and months to land in the West by sea if you survived on the ship. Food was scarce and a sizable number of children were malnourished.

Agriculture was generally poor. The cycle of two yearly crops gave much less than what was needed. My friend late Rafiq Goraya, a media person who was originally from Gujranwala, came up with the most succinct description; “in our villages the mud stoves (chulhay) had grass grown in them for three months of the year.” And this was an area of the central Punjab which was irrigated by canals and had comparatively higher annual rainfall. In the north and the south Punjab not all could afford to have wheat bread round the year. Rice was a delicacy; ordinary mortals would have rice dishes only on the occasions of birth, marriage and death. A few could afford to have medical care. Medical products had a rarity value.

In the villages, for example, a farmer would use his piss as antiseptic to treat his cuts and bruises. Pandemics when they broke out would wipe out towns and cities. Child mortality was high. So was maternal mortality. Look at things now. Highways and motorways have connected even the boondocks with urban areas drastically cutting the traveling time. We can reach Europe in just eight hours. Working class now has motorbikes. The folklore that laments the fate of Pardesi – someone being on a far-off alien land - is no longer possible as you are connected with the global world because of the communication revolution. There is no shortage of food as there is plenty in the market. We have now far greater food intake than our elders had some decades back. We cannot count the eateries and the bakeries that now dot the urban and rural landscapes. Meat consumption, previously negligible, is now ubiquitous. Rice is now part of everyday food. What mars the scene is not the shortage but food distribution controlled by class interests; less for the needy and more for the overfed, a travesty of economic justice.

Medicines are abundantly available and medical care is provided 24/7 by public and private hospitals. Public health facilities though stretched are freely accessible to a very large number of people which was unimaginable in old times. Mortality rate has come down. An irrefutable sign of it is the population explosion we are confronted with. Despite all this we don’t cease cribbing about the loss of the past which, we believe, was better than our present. The fact is that it’s an imagined loss, not real. Our present opens up greater possibilities for us at most levels if we look at the changes brought about by the modern era in our individual and collective life. It shows us our limitless potential partial actualisation of which can enrich and empower us immensely. But it has a cost. Even to survive at a mundane level in these times, we have to work harder because multiple modern facilities of life which we take for granted cannot come free as they are products of manual and intellectual labour done by other human beings.

Labour invariably has a cost. The greater the facilities the bigger the cost. And that’s what we resent. Above all, our socio-economic structures skewed towards the powerful and the rich force the people to pay more for less. Such an injustice makes life more burdensome creating a wish for a return to the past that seems to have a semblance of being idyllic.

Poet Bertolt Brecht tells us how we can have plenty at less cost: “One cannot have plenty of everything all at once/ nourished by the bread of justice /the work can be achieved / from which plenty comes.” Instead of reminiscing about the past shouldn’t one struggle to have justice which would make our present more bearable and future less exacting? — soofi01@hotmail.com

Published in Dawn, October 7th, 2024