So, May 21st has come and gone. The predicted end-of-days, Armageddon, Knowing, Deep Impact etc have not occurred. No asteroid/comet has hit the earth, no aliens have travelled 50 billion miles to kick our collective asses, no super massive solar flare has cooked us alive while somehow managing to blow up everything (flammable or otherwise in truly spectacular CGI fashion!), no Antichrist has appeared and covered the streets with hell-fire (though some people would disagree with the first part of that last statement)
And all the radio jockeys who harped on and on about it along with a certain superannuated minister have been left with egg on their face and so, quite appropriately have pulled a disappearing act!!
I, like millions of my fellow earthlings, have lived through a major apocalypse scare viz 1999/2000. It was terrifying. Why? All because of a book call "Encyclopedia Of The Unknown" which entered my life during the 6th grade. To tell the truth, I'd bought the book (more accurately, pestered my dad into buying me the book) because it had a really cool cover, was at least 3 inches thick and filled with pictures of ghosts, monsters and aliens. And because, like all 11 year olds, I was obsessed with ghosts, monsters and aliens. Till the arrival of said book, which shall henceforth be referred to as The Terror Manual, my exposure to the objects of my obsession had been limited to movies and horror novels.
The movies were strictly monitored by my parents and by monitoring, I mean the inevitable question to the guy behind the counter at the video rental place, "Evanu pattiya padamano?"; for all Malayalam deficient people, that means, "Is this movie suitable for a boy his age??"..more or less. And the guy behind the counter, also a mallu, who took his job very seriously, would reply honestly. It wouldn't have mattered anyway. I grew up in Bahrain! All the officially released movies there underwent a rigorous screening and censoring. I mean, these are the guys who overlayed the kiss at the end of Godzilla (between Ferris Bueller and that annoying-never-to-be-seen-again-in hollywood-small-mouthed-chick) with a sequence of fighter planes flying by.....in freakin SLOW MOTION! Suffice to say, the only gore I managed to catch were from the pirated VHS tapes. But even these were movies approved by the guy behind the counter. So, you can imagine how pissed I was 2 years later, when we switched video rental shops and gained full access to ALL kind of movies (the guy here could care less about my innocence...he's still one of my heroes!). The years of watching "U" movies when I could have been watching....well you KNOW what I could have been watching!! Anyway, you get the idea! As for the horror novels, my imagination wasn't then what it is now. So, the most a horror novel ever gave me was a pleasant tingle.
After years of sanitized movies and horror novels, at the tender age of 11, I started reading the Terror Manual. I nearly shit my pants! That book jumpstarted my imagination like a fucking defibrillator! There were pictures...LOTS of pictures. Not just illustrations either, I'm talking photographs of ghosts (supposedly), pictures from Auschwitz, Bergen-Belsen, of atomic explosions, of murder victims, crime scene photos, lurid descriptions of murders, first hand accounts of ghost and supposed monster encounters. Remember, this book was nearly 3 inches thick with normal sized typeset. We're talking about a shitload of stories and pictures. And what was worse, the bloody book was claiming that every word printed was based on fact, and these were actual photographs! I didn't sleep properly for a few nights. The nightmares were legendary, but I couldn't let my parents know or that book would disappear faster than scotch at an IMA meeting! I was hooked...horrified, but hooked. So, I read diligently from page to page until I reached a section called "Prophesies" and there I was introduced to Michel de Nostradame aka Nostradamus. What I read under that heading scared the living shit outta me! I was literally quaking in my boots. According that damn book, this dude had made like a gazillion predictions and that ALL of them had come true! Actually, the book hadn't said that, but in my rising panic that was the impression i got! And whats worse, according to most scholars, he had predicted that the world would end in 1999! I was terrified. Reading about ghosts, aliens and monsters were all well and good; the chances of me actually meeting one of them was next to nil. But the end of the world would most definitely affect me! Not just me, my parents, my friends, my sega! No more me, no more world! And that was when I first contemplated on what it would feel like to completely cease to exist!! Years later, I found out that many of my friends had had a similar epiphany at some point in their lives. Actually, I think everyone does. The idea that you are you! That you are not some outside entity watching the life of this dude with your name like you're watching a movie! That you can't actually see yourself...that you exist behind your eyes...that you were born...that you would die and that you had no fucking idea what would happen once you were dead!!!! ( The ideas expressed above may sound stupid....but am not sure I can describe a near indescribable feeling better than this!) Being a mama's boy, i ran to my mother and somehow babbled all my fears to her. She, like only mothers can, somehow managed to console me and gave me the usual lines about heaven and god. To tell you the truth I have never actually bought that idea (but more on that later!). She decided that this book was upsetting me and relegated it to a top shelf while extracting a promise from me not to read it till I was older! And so it stayed there for 2 years.
And then it was 1999. The papers were full of the apocalypse BS. The Terror Manual came off the shelf and onto my reading table. I re-read the section on Nostradamus and became something of an authority on him...which helped immensely when it came to the discussions at school. It didn't help my impending sense of doom that I was hit by a speeding Toyota Landcruiser on my freaking BIRTHDAY! (I escaped with a few bruises...still not exactly sure how..its mostly a blur!). And then the papers came out with Y2K...actually they'd been printing shit about that for the past 2 years, but I hadn't really pay attention. And this Y2K shit made sense. I knew computers and had faced enough blue screens of death to know that this is exactly the kind of weird crap that a computer would pull!! Yup! The world was most probably gonna end! And so, 1999 rolled on! Being busy at school kept my mind off morbid thoughts...well, mostly! But there was always this vague feeling of menace in the back of my head throughout that year! And then December31st came and went without any computers shutting down or Skynet gaining sentience or World War III! I was awake at 11:59 and so were my parents. At 12, my parents wished me a happy new year and I kept shushing them, saying our clock could be wrong and Y2K could still happen! It took a quick surf through all the news channels to convince me that everything was OK!
On Jan1st 2000, I was the happiest guy in the world!! Everything seemed sooo much better. The wretchedly hot sunshine in Bahrain didn't seem so bad, even the worst jokes had me laughing out loud (to be fair, it didn't take much to set me off before either) and I was loving life.
Its been a looong time since then. I've read a lot! I've discovered that people watch horror movies and most slasher flicks not for the horror, but for the topless girls and sex scenes that precede the horror and the slashing! I've become a doctor! I've become more rational/logical in thought and action! Or.. so I thought! You see, the lasting legacy of that damned terror manual is that prophecies of doom still provoke atleast 5 minutes of irrational panic within me. Thankfully, I have mastered the art of keeping a straight and calm face while my imagination is screaming bloody murder inside my head. Atleast long enough for the rational part of my brain to kick in! Case in point...2012!! I first heard of it 5-6 years ago. Apparently the world was going to end in 2012. We don't know how, but its going to end in 2012. Why are we so sure? Because the Mayan calendar ends in 2012. The Mayans were able to calculate the length of a year pretty damn accurately to god-know-how-many decimal points. If their calendar ends on 2012, then....*rational brain takes a brief vacation*...FUCK! IT MUST BE TRUE!! THE WORLD'S COMING TO AN END IN 2012!! WE'RE ALL GONNA DIE!! OMG, I'M GONNA DIE A VIRGIN!!!!....*rational brain comes back online*..wait!...breathe deeply...thaaat's it...calm down.... maybe I better check it out! And then an hour of Internet surfing and a few articles by respected scientific authorities later, I realise, its all just a scam. And 4 years later, John Emmerich makes a godawful movie and makes millions off it!!
So what happens when 2012 comes and goes? I believe then it'll be 2024, then 2048 and so on and so forth. The fact is, if the world were going to end, I don't believe that we will be the ones to do it! If not nothing, man is a survivor! Maybe I'm right, maybe I'm just a hopeless romantic! But I believe, that if the world were to end, we'd have very little if no advance warning! (Please don't cite global warming as an example to me! The Day After Tomorrow is pure science fiction!!). If you really want to know how horrible and without warning the universe could kill us, check this out.
But the fact is the next apocalypse is always around the corner. And there'll always be an excuse to make a movie where the core theme is that John Cusack has more lives than a blessed cat! And the next time, the disappointment will be in glorious 3D!
