Dear Reader,

I sit down to write this letter on a pleasant morning in Ahmedabad. December has officially begun and right now it’s a wonderful 16 degrees centigrade, which my friends in Ahmedabad find chilly but for me, coming from the Himalayas, it’s t-shirt weather. Two pigeons on the windowsill keep staring at me and cooing, reminding me of the sparrows and Himalayan bulbuls in our garden back home, who demand a feeding at this time in the morning.

I flew to Ahmedabad a couple of days ago from Chandigarh, which is a defense airport. As we were taking off, I saw a lot of military aircraft standing proudly near hangars in the pale sunshine. It reminded me of all the wars and suffering going on in the world right now. It stirred those emotions which have become a plaything for news media, both mainstream and alternate. I remembered that Donald Trump has won again. I remembered the Israeli Maccabi Tel Aviv fans singing songs about the dead children in Gaza. All of the negativity that I had shoved somewhere in the back of my mind for a few moments, came spilling back out like the blood in that elevator scene in The Shining.

Whenever this happens, I adopt the head space of, “Everything is bullshit! Everyone’s an idiot! I hate humans!” But as our plane took off and I got disconnected from the earth, something changed. While I was looking down the window, my perspective literally expanded in front of my eyes and I had a moment of clarity.

“How the hell have humans, who are so stupid and petty, managed to build such an incredible society?” I wondered. I was thinking particularly of nations and militaries. How have we united such large swaths of land and such disparate peoples, all of whom are selfish and stupid in at least some ways? How can we build and maintain such awesome machines that rain down death and destruction so easily? If we forget about the death and destruction for a minute, our mind boggles at the technological and organizational capacities of our species.

Just a moment ago, an announcement was made that all passengers need to switch off their mobile phones for take off but I saw at least two people continue to use their phones. That’s the kind of people we humans are. We definitely don’t care about others, but we also don’t understand technology enough to care about our own life. It’s more important to make a call than to follow the set procedures. And yet, we have nuclear submarines and fighter jets and ICBMs!

I wouldn’t say this expanded perspective neatly smoothed over all creases in my mind regarding the completely unnecessary suffering we can’t seem to stop inflicting on each other, but it made me realize that the negative perspective is not the be all and end all of humanity. That is an impression one can get if one spends too much time watching the news. As evil as humans can be, we are also pretty great at many other things. Even though we act like idiots a lot, we’re also pretty damn intelligent and smart and creative. Yes, we sometimes use our intelligence and creativity to find ways to hurt each other but that’s not all we use them for.

As we rose over the smog clouds, I started to feel better. Not positive perhaps, but at least neutral. And that’s not nothing, in our age of hyper-information. In fact, it’s a tiny miracle!

I hope reading this letter made you feel at least neutral about humanity too. I mean if you were feeling the anhedonia that has captured all of us through the internet. If you subscribed to me on rudyaaditya.com through wordpress, I’d like to inform you that I’m going to be using their newsletter service to send this weekly series of letters called “Dear Reader,”. I won’t be sending every post in your inbox, just these weekly letters. If for any reason you feel this is not what you signed up for, feel free to unsubscribe, I won’t be offended.

Thanks for reading!

Rudya Aditya