If you are quiet enough, you will hear the flow of the Universe. You will feel its rhythm. Go with this flow, happiness lies ahead.
— A Buddhist Proverb
The dateline was 25 April, 2019, and we were transiting London on the way home to Kuala Lumpur after a business trip to northern Europe. This was pre-pandemic times and things then looked like business-as-usual. On the surface, that was. For that evening, the reality manifested itself emphatically, and intruded in a dramatic form to my mind.
We stayed at a small hotel nearby the Marble Arch, the famous landmark on Oxford Street. Whilst unpacking my bag as soon as I got into my room, I recalled my first ever trip to London on a training course assignment at the Queen Mary’s College, University of London, not long after I joined Petronas as a trainee Legal Officer. It was way back in 1982 and I was a young man then, just fresh out of Law school at the University of Malaya, Kuala Lumpur and anxious to contribute and to prove myself.
Petronas, I soon found out later, was an organisation that was dead serious about skill building, competency upgrading and methodologically progressing corporate expertise, the level of knowledge, the corporate experience profile, and in the search of excellence. The intent was to then deploy all these capability as a top priority execution strategy towards achieving success in organisational building and realising world scale business success. Probably, this sharp and unrelenting focus on capability building was one of the key success factors that brought Petronas from being a mere tax collecting and administration agency at the start in 1974 to be a truly global multinational corporation by the time I left the Global Fortune 500 company, Malaysia’s only. One which was, at one time, listed as amongst the New Seven Sisters, alluding to the terminology coined to represent the best and biggest oil companies in the world.
From that first trip to London, I found out that the most convenient place to stay whilst in London was along the Oxford Street or thereabout, and especially within the vicinity of Marble Arch. It was strategic and positioned oneself to move around on foot or otherwise, with ease around Central London, and is within just a couple of steps away to Hyde Park, one of my favourite destinations whilst in London. In fact, the Marble Arch remains as the grand and direct entrance to the park to this day.
Upon returning to our hotel after a dinner outing nearby, we were drawn to observing a group of people who have occupied Oxford Street in a peaceful protest and demonstration against the Climate Change phenomenon. In April 2019, it was reported that group ‘Extinction Rebellion’ occupied five prominent sites in central London: Piccadilly Circus, Oxford Circus, Marble Arch, Waterloo Bridge, and the area around Parliament Square.
Of course, the single most important issue of our time, an existential challenge, is what is termed as the “Climate Change” phenomenon which is caused mainly by human originated global warming activities. And these people on the street not just here in London but in other cities have a right to protest and voice out their concerns. From other countries like Chile to Lebanon, there are movements which aroused worldwide opposition to climate change and other causes such as opposition to violence against women, massive deforestation, and so on. I was fortunate to witness this peaceful, and meaningful protest.
Revolutions and songs tend to have a nexus and inevitable relationship, so it seems, but the image conjured in the mind is one that is more of a coming together of strange bedfellows. It’s quite understandable however for people to want to use songs as tools to further a cause. This is because songs, by nature, appeal to emotions and the subconscious, and the right song or even a mere soundtrack, if well positioned and leveraged upon, can easily fuel the feelings that will drive the people behind the cause or revolution that they seek to champion.
“Extinc..tion……rebel…liooon! Ex..tinc..tion… rebellion!” were the words they sang, over and over. “Extinction rebellion, Extinction rebellion”!
they recited over and over like a mantra, as they sang and danced into the night.
The whole scene was almost a festive occasion save for the sombre undertones and the underlying reason and motivation behind the protest.
Apparently, every revolution has its music, and as displayed before our eyes on that night on Oxford Street by the Marble Arch, the global protests of 2019 were no exceptions. From Chile to Lebanon, to Rome and Timbuktu, there is a sense of worldwide opposition to climate change, to violence against women, and many other cause and sense of frustrations, and certain songs or anthems have become part and parcel of the soundtrack that fuels these pent-up feelings and righteous anger. This scene on the street was a peaceful protest but nonetheless a depiction of a feeling of revolution which harnessed the energy of real-life discontent, especially by people anxious to make the empathic rallying cry to change the situation.
Watching the whole scene unfolding in front of us brought back images of the hippies from the flower people’s movement in pictures from the 1960s, which I first saw as a young kid growing up in Bario. At that tender age, I had no clue as to their grievances. But I thought it was really cool how they were dressed and the songs they sang. It was years later that I understood what it was all about.
The 1960s saw the growth of a grass root counter culture which was an essentially anti-establishment movement that developed throughout much of the western world and soon spread all over. Even the remote village in the middle of Borneo did not escape untouched as the young men and women returning home for the year end school holidays from their schools in the towns like Marudi and Miri were dressed up in the fashion sense like those in the pictures we saw as kids and sporting the long hair which was popular and considered the epitome for what it meant to be ‘groovy and ‘cool’ at that time.
Fast forward to 2019, a kind of ‘deja vu’ experience was happening through my mind and rather refreshingly amplified, by the scene playing out before my eyes as I watched this group of mainly young people singing and dancing away in the streets of Central London. Their tents were pitched all over the street and there were banners and buntings hung around filled with words, slogans, images and designs depicting their cause and seriousness of intent.
For a moment, part of me connected with what was happening and I felt what they must have felt.
A phrase I read from the Bible years ago came to my recollection — you cannot serve God and mammon. Mammon means money or the worldly riches. The verse is imploring that no one can serve two masters. Either you will hate the one and love the other, or you will be devoted to the one and despise the other. You cannot serve both God and money.
Later, I learnt more about the group “Extinction Rebellion” and about their cause or grievances.
They are just one of the groups around the world who have similar or identical grievances and causes. The attached link is a good place to start to know about them and their cause:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Extinction_Rebellion
Now back to the dateline first mentioned at the beginning of this article, namely April 25, 2019.
Note that it was a time when the coronavirus disease has yet to surface. But just a mere six or seven months later, the current outbreak of coronavirus disease (COVID-19) was first reported from Wuhan, China, on December 31, 2019. Eversince, it has become a global pandemic which has brought the whole world to its knees, and from which we are still struggling to get up from.
In hindsight, the cry of “extinction” and “rebellion” seemed prescient as well as ironic and paradoxical. Those young people singing and dancing melancholically on the streets of London and other cities with a message, or rather they were the message — and a warning and a hint of the need for forbearance, about something very dramatic and impending upon the world.
It was just that we did not know it at that time. Now we know, albeit in hindsight. And we are still struggling with the pandemic and its consequences. One thing is obvious — the world will never be the same again. And maybe, this is just the beginning. We have tinkered too much with our living space and the earth’s pristine environment. Our environmental sins will be back to haunt us, sooner or later. Perhaps, we need to be mindful of what Rumi said: “The human being resembles a tree; its root is a covenant with God: That root must be cherished with all one’s might.”
By the looks of things so far, we have mainly chosen to serve mammon rather than God. And so, not surprisingly, we earn the fruits of our labour, that is, the threat of extinction.
