In 1935, Evelyn Waugh set out to search the pre-war Georgian era. Two years later in 1937, Graham Greene tried presenting till then this little known collection as a collage in a short lived literary magazine (Night and Day). This interesting collage is a mix of reports from Waugh’s immediate past, bits and pieces from his personal diary, and from newspapers of the age, ads, lines of poems and bits of social gossip. Greene confesses he does not know why Waugh chose the pieces that he did. Read almost a century later, the pieces exude a similar feeling of living through a surrealistic and unsettled reality, of unnamed dread and a certain black humour. He quotes Stephen Spender:‘We, who live under the shadow of a war,What can we do, that matters ?’What indeed ?In an age where times are delivering surreal judgments, incarcerating social workers, allowing bank robbers to flee, hanging four men for rape, permitting another rapist to get away, giving bail to a rich media baron charged with killing, calling for public auction of assets of yet to be charged people to fulfill government’s losses in a riot .Do these fables seem surreal?We can see similar trivia in our media today.We rage helplessly at our courts delivering surreal judgments, incarcerating complainants who dared report rapes while allowing the rapists to get away, on bail or with cases against them dismissed for lack of ‘credible’ evidence, to giving tickets for contesting elections to men and women with criminal cases in their past.Illustration: Pariplab ChakrabortyThe hordes of students and migrant labourers flying west used to hope that on the aftermath of pulling out of Vietnam, Iraq and Afghanistan, after so many body bags arrived home, ultimately western democracy might revert to things which are more urgent. That the private interest of citizens in vital areas like health, education and civic administration. find inspiration not in Churchill’s rhetoric but Obama’s. How does mankind cope with news of imminent death of an era ?Let us cut to our own experience of the war-like days of the Covid-19 pandemic. On Thursday, March 19, 2020, the prime minister came on TV urging the nation to stand together and face the challenge, display their unity in face of the virus by clapping and beat thalis after a janata curfew on the evening of Sunday (March 22, 2020). The TV screens quickly filled with Bollywood giants and their privileged families ringing out Coronavirus with silver bells, ordinary middle class families beating drums in large groups shown in the media so dangerously and spectacularly.Similar mad desperation haunts the air again from Washington to Tel Aviv to Tehran. Pakistan is helping hold peace talks between the warring nations while whole cities are bombed out, dead civilians, soldiers, leaders. those killed include migrant workers from Asia doing menial jobs for the oil rich nations, unarmed Iranian navy men killed on their way back from India after a jolly week of joint sea patrolling. Iran and the strait of Hormuz are unreachable, so media has fanned out in Dubai, Tel Aviv, Washington, with one Hindi anchor popping up in Switzerland!Back home in Noida-based TV studio discussions show these worthies suitably attired in soldierly clothes telling us how brave they are to be reporting while missiles and bombs explode all around.This forms a part of the nine or dozen headlines. The rest is devoted to ministers praising the leadership’s latest inaugural spectacle, foretelling results of state elections, flashing data from god knows where.Then there are the food and fashion pages. They continue despite all. In fact the number of columns on conspicuous consumption take your breath away. Page after page of festive dining for Eid and Navratri and Navroz, also sneaking in bits about saving energy and preparing for days with no petro products, no cooking gas. They make great stories, given that people are bored and need comfort food.Ah what a war!Folks want to eat well and watch movies about the wars. Dhurandhar rakes in money while slow fuses are smoking in Kashmir valley, in UP, in Karnataka, Kolkata. But listening to the grandstanding of our leaders in Parliament and electoral rallies and media conclaves, you would not think war exists so close by. Voices of sanity are ridiculed by trolls employed by political cells, that keep reminding us of failures of diplomacy, misjudgments, small town corruption and electoral malpractices in rural ares, the head of one of the largest banks resigning saying enough !Come Navratris and Bhajan Clubbing drowns out bad news. Little girls are raped and killed by nameless predators in back lanes in poor areas, the politicians host feasts for Kanya Poojan and wash little girls feet and ask they bless us all.Waugh quotes Tom Paine from Landor’s Imaginary conversations :“Eloquence has the varnish of falsehood; Truth has none…Burke is eloquent; I am not. If I write better..it is because I have seen things more distinctly, and have had the courage to turn them up…on their backs, in spite of tooth and claw..”Tomorrow is another day.Even the educated among us seem to have forgotten that the term ‘idiot’, comes from Greek ‘idiotes’, meaning an isolated or private individual, unwilling to participate in democracy.Mrinal Pande is a writer and veteran journalist.Saakhi is a Sunday column from Mrinal Pande, in which she writes of what she sees and also participates in. That has been her burden to bear ever since she embarked on a life as a journalist, writer, editor, author and as chairperson of Prasar Bharti. Her journey of being a witness-participant continues.