Anna Wulf, the Dorris Lessing creation who struggles for deeper honesty by ridding herself of the nonsense around, observes at the beginning of The Golden Notebook: ‘the point is, that as far as I can see, everything’s cracking up.’ That image speaks of many subtle forms of fragmentation in the novel. But in Wulf’s time and ours, as far as we can see, and often we aren’t allowed to see very far, everything is cracking up.

The world doesn’t seem to be vegetating anymore. Four oldies are down in the Middle East or West Asia, whatever is in house style, one is cranking, and the Egyptians are on political steroids for a double revolution. Greece, the cradle of the Western civilisation, has gone bankrupt. Italians have ditched a playboy for a technocrat. The people in Spain would have liked Zapatero’s socialism if they could afford it. They decided last week they couldn’t. Clean up the mess, Mariano Rajoy.

America’s a bit on the margins of this theatre; but what do you say to a wannabe Pacific power with an Atlantic worldview. This of course makes China nervous about its predominance in its east and south. But it can take solace in the fact that its crazy sovereign wealth keeps the Western European hope of prolonging Europe’s advanced stage of decadence alive. Australia, meanwhile, is very interested in India; so is Walmart. India seems very interested in peace with Pakistan, which, given what has cost Mr Haqqani his job, appears to be bad timing. The only movement to give occupation a good name has withstood over two months of sustained pressure – surely a demise of those who missed the Soviet Union?

Think of this as one world and we find hope locked in a consuming battle with despair. This struggle has produced an anxious world. Anxiety is the prevailing global mood.

Widely felt anxiety is a modern unease. It often emerges from the rubbles of damaged reason. Reason entices modern societies to become ambitious about the limits of what we can achieve by efficiently organising the abilities of the mind. If only humans could put their minds together, they would unravel the world – so reads the fiction. Rudyard Kipling had a way of achieving this:

I keep six honest serving-men(They taught me all I knew);Their names are What and Why and WhenAnd How and Where and Who.

Of the five Ws and one H, Why is the king.

Nothing makes reason more virtuous than when we summon it to answer ‘the Why question.’ Why? Because why explains, and we have all been told that we conquer what we can explain. Nothing demystifies like a satisfactory answer to a diligent why. Nothing disenchants more thoroughly than a satisfactory answer to a diligent why either.

There are limits to human reason, especially collective human reason. Stalin, Hitler, Mao and humanitarian practitioners of liberal democracy in more recent times have done us a service by repeatedly exposing the limits of collective human reason. The germs of inhumanity are found in collective human reason. Each tale of damaged reason returns a disenchanted world. As people lose hope in the prose of modernity, they recoil with anxiety.

Keen habits are also cunning habits. The cunningness of reason inspires us to the Why question even when we know an answer isn’t around. The kolaveri di phenomenon has become a rage because it speaks to that cunning habit. Asking why the soup song, the flop song, has become so popular is also, circularly, the reason why it is so popular. What else, and I fall in the trap here, explains the exponential growth in its popularity now that people know what kolaveri di means: it really means nothing.

But it must mean something if, in just over a week, over four and a half million (count taken on Friday, 9 pm IST) people find an apparent nothingness interesting. The key cultural message of the chinna surprise may be that it is serving two functions. First, it is establishing that we live anxious lives, a tad wary of being able to know the answers of the Five Ws, the one H and their cousins. One opportunity to revel in the unknown and we will do everything to resurrect the magic of not knowing it all. If we put our mind to it, it would seem absurd why people are watching something that makes no meaningful sense, again and again and again.

Second, by going viral we are also trying to heal our anxious selves. There is often so much meaning around – created, contested, demolished, recreated – that we feel it is good to transition into zones of no-meaning; to zones where meaning is absent. Kolaveri di is one such zone of no-meaning. Let us ask not why, but ‘Why this kolaveri di’ because it has no answer.

And it is proper that it has no answer.