2012

by all objective standards this movie is subpar and my review extremely biased.

in the love song of j. alfred prufrock, poet t.s. eliot writes that he has measured out his life with coffee spoons. well so have i, only with books and movies- some downright godawful, others remarkably life changing- but all of them, cumulatively, a qualitative measure of life’s progression against different eras in time. 2012 is no different. having an adhd brain with a patchy autobiographical memory means that pulling out memories from the recesses of my mind feels functionally impossible until there is a mnemonic-like hook i can associate it with and once that hook is triggered,,,w h a m! the deluge of memories comes flooding in.

2012 is that hook for me. it would’ve been a filler year with no particularly salient memory worth sticking out, if not for the fifth-grade rumours that the world was soon going to end and that we had better start living our lives the way it was meant to be lived. some little 10 year old conspiracy theorist spread a rumour during an annual school function in november 2012 that our last day on earth would be 21 december 2012 and like all things elementary-school-gossip it travelled ear to ear through the grapevine and suddenly kids were scribbling notes confessing our crushes, outing teachers who’d yelled at us unjustifiably and bullies who mocked our adolescent acne, refusing to turn in math homework and resurrecting lost friendships. i admitted to my best friend that i felt excruciatingly jealous of her hanging out with other fifth-graders and she replied i was irreplaceable and i think i fell a little in love with her right then, just as i would over and over and over again in the female friendships that came after. we were little kids and we didn’t care about tomorrow because there apparently wasn’t going to be a tomorrow. the adults of course knew better but they mercifully never corrected us and let the month-long joy bloom like spring peonies in the dead of winter. for a few weeks the so-called impending apocalypse had given a bunch of children permission to break the occasional rule, live without inhibition and love without embarrassment. it was beautiful, some of the most beautiful times in my life i think. 

several years later when the infamous nepal earthquake rippled outwards into our city in 2015, we huddled under the banyan trees watching our multiplex towers visibly sway back and forth. it remains the singlemost incredulous and bone-chilling sight of my life. once the authorities confirmed over the radio that the tremors had mellowed and it was safe to get back in our homes, me and my next-door neighbour rewatched 2012 in her flat and it was a surreal hyperrealistic cinematic experience for us 13 year olds who had just lived through a 7.8 richter-scale earthquake. that afternoon, the ridiculous spectacle on the screen had acquired the faintest outline of plausibility and catastrophe suddenly felt less imaginary. life at the time felt precarious and unpredictable, and it is perhaps why i savoured every minute of it. 

i turn 25 this week and a part of me still wonders what if the world had indeed come to a halt on 21 december 2012. it is a question i would often wrestle with in my late teens and early twenties while grappling with a topsy-turvy mental health and cussing out life when it didn’t progress in the direction i felt entitled to, but today this question has acquired an entirely different weight. it is also ultimately a futilely speculative question but i have made peace with my answer- i am grateful the world has continued and i hope it continues infinitely, especially in the shadow of civilisation-altering technologies today that threaten the very core of our personhood. and i’m grateful this subpar movie had us kids imagine otherwise, even if only for a blip in time.