Perhaps hope will triumph in future: It is difficult to say. The start of 2010 marked with a massive earthquake that hit Haiti.  At the moment, it seems to be ending in a slight chill: Other end-of-the-year events have included the on-going financial slow-down around the world coupled with the partly media-created scare to climate change, banning of minarets and religious freedom, the social networking phenomena- facebook, twitter, my space etc. It says a lot about the world we live in that only the ‘financial slow-down' is seen as an ‘economic crisis' when climate change and even minor political developments like the ban against minarets, instability in Congo and Nigeria and sea piracy in Somalia etc are rooted in aspects of haywire, unfair or unsustainable global economic regimes going back at least three centuries. As we remember, 2009 perhaps ended with an anti-climax in that the Copenhagen summit did not achieve what it needed to, but progress continues to be made. 2010 was not different. But what to expect?

The economic melt-down and recovery, the ‘on-going event', is a complex matter too: It dictates both to the past and the future and also our basic economic system. The future, because the national economies of countries like India and China are still doing comparatively well. Some Western critics claim, with reference to India's uneven infrastructure and China's dependence on American markets (‘Chimerica' is the term coined by one such historian), that this is deceptive. The ongoing crisis has revealed the extent of global interconnectedness, exposing an underappreciated set of linkages between players as diverse as homeowners in the USA, asset-backed securities traders in London, manufacturing firms in Asia, and agricultural exporters in Latin America. The global economy presented a largely dismal phenomena throughout the year, as credit tightened and international trade declined. Governments and central banks responded to problems created by the easy credit and consumption boom of the years before 2006 with unprecedented fiscal stimulus and institutional bailouts. Will all this help the average worker, laid off in Detroit or Dubai? Or is it only a confirmation of the faulty general principle that it is best to lose a few hundred millions, and be bailed out by governments, than to forfeit the mortgage on your flat, and be rendered houseless?  Perhaps humanity was always under assault by the kind of rampant fundamentalist Capitalism that led to the ‘financial melt-down', and the crisis has simply made it visible to more of us?

The banning of minarets in Swiss and its further implications in 2010 is a ghost from the past: It signifies the problem that Europe and West is having with its Capitalist-liberal post-coloniality. For, when Asia and Africa became post-colonial after gaining  independence in the 20th century, Europe also became post-colonial. The ‘post' certainly defines both the colonisers and the colonised. Post-coloniality was a result of an on-going world system, economic and political. But while disadvantaged Asia and Africa have been learning to live with their globalised post-coloniality for a century, privileged Europe is only now facing up to that reality. And hence, as economies slow down in post-colonial Capitalist Europe, European politicians scramble to find scapegoats and distractions — migrants or minarets. We can take a cue from India, the ancient Indian culture goes back to atleast 4500 years old, which houses so many different religions in such huge proportions. India is, at the same time, #1 home to World’s 3rd largest religion (Hinduism), #3 home to World’s 2nd largest religion (Islam), #1 home to World’s three other major religions (Sikhism, Zoroastrianism and Jainism) including  Christianity(> 24 million) and birthplace of Buddhism (>8 million). Most western nations that tout their secular principles fail to uphold their test of tolerance when compared with India. Most of these nations ask for conformity from its minorities and do not allow you to express yourself ‘freely’. According to these nations, conformance to habits or customs of the majority is considered integration. In India, there is no need to conform to the customs or habits of majority (with some exceptions of late). India’s unity and integration comes from allowing and preserving its diversity, which seems to be alien to most Western secular and democratic nations and offers a way to imbibe the respect for basic human beliefs and values.

The year was also a minefield in regions like Afghanistan and Iraq and even Pakistan. The Obama administration and NATO approved for sending more troops in these ravaged regions. At least it is better to stay and clear up the mess that has been made (or made worse) than to run. Most independent surveys have concluded that more than a million Iraqis lost their lives in the past six-seven years under the American occupation. Iraqi officials have said that there are between one million and two million war widows and five million orphans. But are Western powers willing to spend 20 times as much on constructing Afghanistan and Iraq as they spend on destroying it? Because that, finally, is what it will take: Calculate the cost of a bullet, multiply it by 20 and spend it on creating jobs and civil society in Afghanistan and Iraq, or any of the other ‘trouble spots' on the globe. It is easy enough to construct a scenario in which the Middle East explodes into flames sooner or later, dragging the rest of the world into a churning crisis of widening military confrontation, terrorist attacks in western cities, and a global economic recession spawned by chronic oil shortages.  An Israeli aerial attack on Iran’s suspect nuclear facilities is the most obvious trigger. Any such action would be likely to provoke retaliatory attacks on Israel by Iran’s Lebanese proxy, Hezbollah, and against U.S. targets in Bahrain and the Gulf. The growing sense of disenchantment with the youthful U.S. President is not at all a rare phenomenon. Mr. Obama’s early promise to overhaul the strained relations between his country and the Muslim world is far from reality. A war in Yemen will also dash the remaining hopes regarding Mr. Obama’s offer to repair the badly battered image and influence of American power in the Muslim world. My hope is that religious politics - whether Islamic fundamentalism or its equivalents of other faiths - may reach its limits. There are already signs that Islamism is becoming conscious of its own harmful consequences and is beginning to contemplate internal reform. It would be welcome were this process to be echoed in similar self-reflection by those who previously disregarded the suppressive aspects of capitalist globalization.

The year like recent years also was full of causalities, uprising and deaths in other parts of the world. These deaths  are indicator of another tragedy, not unconnected to the economic structures of the world. Another tragedy corresponds to the tragedy being played out in Ethiopia, Somalia, Congo, Zimbabwe and other countries, and in the impoverished villages or urban slums of Bangladesh and India. The estimates of  deaths in such invisible spaces — from illness, starvation, government policies, economic upheavals, bullets and bombs — ran into hundreds of thousands in 2009. Except that, unlike any famous celebrity or political leader demise, these deaths did not count, at least for the world media. That there is a crisis might also have been underlined by the other crises like ‘swine flu' scare. While such scares are always exaggerated by the media, perhaps they also suggest a twisted perception that something is seriously wrong with the present world. The terror of flu deaths in 2009, very few compared to media hyper-ventilation, is clearly an exposure of our growing inability to deal with the deadly nature of our ‘wars' and ‘crises' in other fields.
 
The year also saw big events like soccer world cup in South Africa, hosting of  Commonwealth Games by India in New Delhi along with Hockey World Cup, Shanghai World Expo, Kumbh Mela in India; the largest religious gathering on planet earth, series of climate change and energy summits and many more International events mostly political and economic. History has seen the transfer of power from mobs to empires and from empires to states and corporations. The recent transmissions of control, from giant institutions to small groups and citizens, could be our last if we fail to wield power properly. We have the opportunity to redefine “progress” for a new era. Technology and globalization are presenting us with opportunities to build entirely new futures from the ground up. We stand today on the verge of yet another great evolutionary leap forward. There is a good chance that politics and culture will take a more collective turn. There are plenty of people working towards an acknowledgment of our economic, ecological and cultural interdependence, and a refiguring of our politics in response to that. The perspectives of a new generation may influence understanding of the systems of political representation and participation in the years to come. Also, the most powerful idea for the 21st century should be the equality of women. It is the idea most feared by those - from the Vatican to the Taliban - arrayed against modernity, the still vibrant project of the Enlightenment. Someday the United States may even have a woman president. The big issues of the next decade are already with us, but a new type of politics is needed to deal with them successfully.

What we do now is important. We must, each one of us, pledge ourselves to action in helping to move humankind towards a way of living where the humanistic family ethic overlays the nationalistic, linguistic, religious, and ethnic differences that separate us. We work toward the time when the world will be at peace and human energy will be focused on the needs and well-being of all members of a single family, a time when we will enjoy and celebrate our unique differences while exalting the importance of our human similarities, a time when we will acknowledge the basic human needs that unite us including our mutual concerns for the futures of our children, our grandchildren and our great-grandchildren who constitute the future. I hope present and future will see an intensified discussion about the kind of economics  we need to survive and thrive in the 21st century. It might also see a stronger focus on the need to protect ecosystems services. “Not only would we find ourselves in a world of sustainable wealth, abundance and efficiency, we’d be living in a civilization that, for the first time, had really started to think like a mature, adult society.”

With a bit of faith and a dash of luck, future might just bring some pleasant surprises…!!!