The argument against Wokeism isn’t Neanderthal nastiness against any movement that stands for improving the eco-system and our lives. But it is important to thumb your nose at prejudice and shady superiority that glorifies egocentric conscience. – Ravi Shankar
It is time to wake up to Woke. A bigoted buzzkill movement that is taking over the world yelling, “We are better than you,” just like the Nazis told the Jews “We are superior to you,” and liberals tell those who don’t subscribe to their self-pitying newsletters that “We are superior to you.” Woke is a conscience collage of race, gender, LGBTQ+ rights, Islamophobia, identity politics and Leftist cancel culture. America excels in exporting moral eccentricities, and its fickle freight, Wokeism, is deadlier than a Hellfire missile. Vegans, sustainability savants, ethical eaters and loutish Left liberals are Woke, which is just an extreme form of attention-seeking in cut off jeans and handwoven kurtas.
The most bacterial word de jour is ‘sustainability’, another Woke wonder. Sustainability is certainly a noble concept that stands against the depletion of natural resources and to protect the environment from corporate greed while ensuring a better, healthier life for future generations. And like all noble intentions it is a calamity of contradictions.
Only a small percentage of food can be called sustainable, and is available mostly in expensive urban stores while the average Indian farmer needs fertiliser to grow his crops: 63.92 million metric tonne of fertilisers were used in 2022-2023, since agriculture contributes about 22 per cent of the country’s GDP. Architects following the sustainability syndrome are mostly hip hypocrites, whose building processes consume around 40 per cent of the total raw material used and generate massive amounts of waste during extraction, transformation, construction and demolition; at the same time harvesting rainwater in the terrace garden’s koi pool with pretty panache.
Recycling is a cachet catchphrase although mostly it is the design that is recycled. Sustainability is conscience with a soupcon of exotica: carbon positive bikinis, organic lehengas, vegan tuxedos and sugarcane sneakers. Most dress materials are produced in factories using plastic; fashion houses simply cannot monitor the supply chain’s speed in purveying newer styles. Retailers must constantly launch new lines to make a profit, which encourages carbon-production since 69 per cent of all fashion materials are synthetic and made from petrochemicals.
Recycling is a flimflam: a study on the recent life cycle of cotton jeans showed the climate change impact of buying and throwing away a pair of jeans “is almost equal to upcycling the jeans into a new pair.” Any woker joker who tells me an electric car is sustainable has a career as a stand-up comic in a drivel dive where Greta Thunberg is on the guitar: in India, electricity is generated from fossil fuels. EV’s Lithium-ion batteries are combustible and have unstable power cells; moreover it takes about a century for the metal casing to decompose in a landfill while it will take centuries for the chemicals in it to decompose.
The argument against Wokeism isn’t Neanderthal nastiness against any movement that stands for improving the eco-system and our lives, and that of those who come after us. But it is important to thumb your nose at prejudice and shady superiority that glorifies egocentric conscience. Animal cruelty justifiably shocks both vegetarians and vegans, but vegetarianism is a moral choice while veganism is political action. Wokeism is a great danger to humanity’s moral survival which abhors extremes. Today’s Woke password to popularity and sales is ‘sustainability’, which in real terms is rather unsustainable. – The New Indian Express, 17 October 2024
› Ravi Shankar is a columnist and newspaper editor in New Delhi.
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