The future is uncertain. It is a question whose answer we will never know. Perhaps it may be more comforting to look back into the pastIJ
We are looking back at the year gone by. Print magazines present to us the 20 best photographs of the year, news commentators are reviewing 2016’s major events, and in our heads we assess if the year went by too fast or was a drag, at times with a mellow view of our own personal annual history. The future is uncertain. It is a question whose answer we will never know. Perhaps it may be more comforting to look back in to the pastIJ
We reminisce nostalgically. A group of researchers at the University of Colorado at Boulder a few years ago set off to investigate how we form our impressions of the past. They found that we tend to experience emotions from the past less strongly than emotions from the present. The intensity of our emotions decrease over time. The researchers had a group of people watch a frightening movie clip. Immediately after watching it, the group thought it was very scary. About 20 minutes later, the researchers had the same group watch a second movie clip which was as scary as the first one. The group then evaluated the first clip once again after having viewed the second, but did not find the first clip so frightening looking back on it.
Further, another piece of research a few years later found that when people think back at events in the past, they remember the evaluation they gave that event, but not the reason for that evaluation. We tend to label certain events with how we felt at that moment which may not be accurate relative to experiences that occurred later. It was inferred that this is why when we look back at events from our youth, we are likely to remember many things as being excellent, while we forget how we decided on their excellence or brilliance. We do not compare it to the broader base of experiences as an adult either. Things must have been better when we were younger, we tend to feel.
I find the nostalgia evoked at the end of the calendar year fascinating. An object of our own creation, the construction of calendars requires the use of mathematics and astronomy often accompanied with religious connotations. For instance there is a clear connection between regional religions and domestic calendars, and the utilisation of these local calendars involves cultural sophistication. In fact, the history of calendrical progress itself can explain much about society in which these developments occur.
But the global calendar of the world is the Christian one. This too is a highly complex process — the start of this calendar year varies with the exact geographic location of a place, and the use of a shared time and a common calendar requires the fixing of a reference location or principal meridian. Organising ourselves to do this across various parts of the world has been politically charged to say the least.
And so now as a result of the calendar, we have managed to create a common moment of nostalgia the world over. At midnight on December 31 we usually turn our backs to the events of the year gone by and await the new year. We typically feel courageous, hopeful, euphoric, falling into the belief that with new beginnings the load of the past is diminished and even left behind.
I am supportive of every emotion that unites the world in a shared optimistic perspective. But it is more challenging to do so this end of the year though, when the unthinkable became possible. There were frequent terror attacks that we can not forget. The blood that flowed in Syria stains our memory. Jo Cox can never be buried. The shooting in Orlando still rings in our ears.
Indeed for the first time two former military men were sentenced to a combined 360 years in jail after being found guilty of holding 15 indigenous women in sexual slavery in the 1980s — but we are dismayed at how far we still have to go to stop these atrocities. In fact, we can not forget the 35,000 women who are raped each year in India itself.
Not quite 1789 or 1989, but this has been a year that has also reversed political status quo. Fraught with blood and terror it has been a good year for crowd-pleasers and rabble-rousers who won elections by whipping up voter emotions with political rhetoric. Many feel that Brexit defined 2016 in this context and the impression was reinforced ultimately by a property tycoon becoming the US President.
Indeed we are nowhere near a great depression. Yet the memories of the upheavals globally are hard to brush away this year.
The course of time can not erase the memory of how politics — a manmade institution — became larger than the cost of our own lives. And so as we unite in looking back at the end of a calendar year — another object of our own creation — we might rejoice at the progress made in 2016 on artificial intelligence, gene editing, and self-driving cars. Yet we can not forget that this year only 21 of the 200 girls kidnapped from their school in Nigeria over two years ago by Boko Haram have been released.
Thanks to the humble calendar on the wall, at this time of the year we are united in our shared perspective. Perhaps we can also move forward together in overcoming the calamities that we have inflicted upon ourselves.
let us try doing so, year after year.
The writer is Chief Sustainability Officer for the group of companies, Jindal Steel and Power ltd.
She is a Global leadership Alumna of the World Economic Forum. miniya.chatterji@jindalsteel.com