Column

It would seem absurd to ask after nine years into the new century — and the new millennium — that the 21st century has not yet happened. Defining moments do not always go with the calendar. We now know that 20th century did not kick in by 1900 or even in the first nine years up to 1909, but that it had happened much after 1920, after the First World War of 1914-18 and the 1917 Russian Revolution. Both the war and the revolution were considered echoes of the previous century.

The heady age of jazz of the 1920s with its social and artistic frenzy marked the birth of the new century. Interestingly, the major creative quakes too occurred in the 1920s. Interestingly, TS Eliot’s The Wasteland, James Joyce’s Ulysses, Ludwig Wittgenstein’s Tractatus Logico-Philosophicus were all published in 1922. Niels Bohr won a Nobel prize in physics in this year for his atomic theory showing the orbiting electrons round the atomic nucleus, which was first publishedin 1913, the same year Igor Stravinsky’s modern masterpiece Rite of Spring was premiered.

It was in 1915 that Hollywood’s first mega-film DW Griffith’s Birth of a Nation was released in 1915, when Albert Einstein published his second major formulation on the general theory of relativity, after he published the initial special theory of relativity in 1905.

The only radical things to have happened as soon as 20th century began were in the field of painting with radical movements of Cubism, Fauvism, culminating in Dadaism and Surrealism of the 1920s and 1930s. But they caught the imagination much later and even in the 1950s, nearly half-a-century after they appeared, they retained their shock effect of radical newness.

A similar explosion in creativity is yet to happen in the new century we have stepped into. It may or may not happen and at the moment it appears that there will be more frenzy about the usual changes which we describe as major or revolutionary because we are too anxious to mark the new times. But they might appear less radical as the years pass. For example, the September 11, 2001 terror attack in New York and in Washington is indeed diabolical but not momentous enough.

What it has unleashed are two 20th century type wars in Afghanistan and in Iraq. Is the election of Barack Obama as the first black president of the US of A revolutionary? No. It is interesting and significant but not astonishing and if it has become ordinary that is because of Obama’s predictable politics.

China and India, the two colossi of the new century, are yet to stride the globe. China has moved into the top slot of big powers, overtaking Japan and the European Union (EU), but it has not become big and great enough to make an impact on the world. It will, but it is still in the future. It has yet to contribute ideas to the making of the 21st century world. Indians are accepting the fact that they do not have to look to Europe and America and that they have to do things for themselves.

The Western world is indeed at the end of the tether of its imagination, but Indians and Chinese have not yet moved in to lead the next revolutions in the world of arts, literature, philosophy and science.

A century can pass by without any great things happening. The 18th century was rather quiet till its last quarter. The American and French revolutions occurred in 1776 and in 1789. The Industrial Revolution which had started around the same time took longer time to take shape and shape others. It peaked only in the 19th century. Perhaps 21st century will have to continue the many scientific and technological revolutions unleashed in the second half of the 20th century like air and space travel.

The one area that this century can mark out for itself could be the challenge posed by climate change. How will it utilise the opportunities thrown up if the Arctic Ocean were to become like the Mediterranean Sea?