Opinion | It’s clear that people miss having other people around

People have been missing people. Not just remote lovers, friends, siblings and parents, but they are missing what we usually mean when we say “people”—those strangers who make up the hum and the din and the whole backdrop of life. The extras in the gripping story about us, who murmured in cafes as we spoke to someone more important, and whose bodies and laughter we needed in a movie hall, but whom we despised for the long queue for popcorn, and for the traffic on the road, for crowding trains, filthy loos, and for their weddings, for blocking hotel reservations, raising airfares and ruining our air, and whom we wished to kill before birth through pious population control policies.

The government has backed off a bit from our lives, chiefly because it is unable to pretend that it knows what it is doing, and now we can go almost anywhere we want. But we are still cautious. Death by covid is a bit like cancer—people covertly blame you for it. So we are not fully back yet to the way we were before. As a result, we are not there for the strangers, as their backdrops in cafes, just as they too have vanished from ours.

In the exquisite TV series Fleabag, Fleabag tells an older woman that most people, “are shit”. And the older woman says the most beautiful thing: “People are all we’ve got.”

And that is what the pandemic has reminded us. People are all we have got. Including the secret lovers of tyrants and the sanctimonious charlatans. They are the energy we feed off. When we sustained our longest lie—that we love diversity, not only in forests but also in humans—what we originally meant was that we want diversity in the extras who make up the backdrop of our stories, for aesthetic reasons, so long as the diversity was not too glaring.

As great cities emptied out for our pandemic, we at first enjoyed the gaping emptiness and silence. People across the world celebrated images of animals taking over roads; even Indians pretended it was something unusual. And images of dolphins in urban waters with spurious captions became popular. But soon we could see the gloom in the emptiness. Peace, yes, but who would have thought peace would be so melancholic? The bleak can marinate in the calm and stillness for weeks, but most people find happiness in the buzz of activity. If I may paraphrase a timeless lament of an anonymous lover: We are miserable without people, it is almost like having them around.

Indians are more attuned to the energy of the crowd. It’s not only because of our massive population. Congestion is often a consequence of poor infrastructure. That is why we resent the crowd. Not the monoculture of a concert crowd, or a theatre crowd, but of the crush of poor desperate humans everywhere else.

Yet, when we used to visit advanced countries, after the first few days of appreciation, something in us died when we saw their hollow exquisite towns. The act of driving miles without seeing any human makes many Indians feel they are at the start of a bad apocalypse movie. And we get unsettled not only by their highways, but also towns.

I remember when I first visited Edinburgh, I wondered if there had been some calamity—where were the people? The city was a cluster of beautiful buildings, but where were the people? Where were the extras to fill desolate beautiful lanes and cafes?

When those extras visit India for the first time, especially Mumbai, they, too, might think there has been a calamity—they have never seen so many people, and people in Mumbai going about life resemble people fleeing a natural calamity.

When I was in my 20s, I used to be suspicious of the kind of people who said, “I love books” or “I love films”. They behaved as though all books and films were the same, a single collective organism, even though they can surely like only a small fraction of them. But now I get that what those lovers of books and films were marvelling at was the crowd of stories, the extras that form a backdrop. People say, “I love books” or “I love films” because they are too proud to say, “I love people”.

It is for all these reasons that I feel the talk about work-from-home and how the office will never return to its old power is a bit of nonsense. People are behaving as though internet conferencing was invented this month. The technology to turn the office obsolete has been around for years. But the office has survived for a good reason.

Work is mostly about companionship. Also, as a Silicon Valley guru pointed out recently, people are able to work well through video conferencing only because they have already built social connections in the real world.

A few years ago, a man came up with a drink called Soylent, which was a powder that had all the nutrients a body needed. You mix it with water and drink it. It is probably a more complete meal than conventional food. People who sampled it, who replaced regular meals with Soylent encountered a few problems. The most severe was not its taste. It was time.

They suddenly had too much time on their hands. We forget what eating is actually about—it is about people. From reading about food, talking about it, foraging for it in markets and cooking to the actual act of consumption, food is not really about eating, just as religion is not quite about God. In the same way, work is not about work.

Everything we do is about people—only the excuse changes.

Manu Joseph is a journalist, and a novelist, most recently of ‘Miss Laila, Armed And Dangerous’