Facts are passe. Oxford Dictionaries has selected “post-truth” as 2016's international word of the year. The dictionary defines “post-truth” as “relating to or denoting circumstances in which objective facts are less influential in shaping public opinion than appeals to emotion and personal belief.” But as Buddha said three things cannot be long hidden: the sun, the moon, the truth.

If you stare at the abyss, the abyss stares back at you... —Friedrich Nietzsche

You can sacrifice a memory in a desert and eliminate it eternally, as post-modernism will tell you, with its exclusivity and power of knowledge and language. Memory is not a restricted ‘all white’ club of the elite. You can’t sacrifice a memory and eliminate it, because it will come back, again and again, like a memory and a sacrifice.

Like ancient Aleppo, a civilisational landmark, which is today as much a grotesque art installation as it is a war memorial crying saline, bloody tears: melted, turned into a volcanic lava of mass graves, brutalized, dehumanized, transformed into a multiple neo-architecture of rubble, wires, barbed wires, dynamite, land mines, bombs, gun shells, burnt out and destroyed walls, bombed out streets, by-lanes, homes, bedrooms, with the number of dead and dying, hungry and thirsty, raped and ravaged, as abstract and as unknowable like an abstract painting drawn by hallucinatory post-modernists celebrating the statistics of late capitalism outside the domain of all history and civilization.

Indeed, Aleppo is the truth of modern times which can never become a post-truth; it is the normalcy which denies the ‘new normalcy’ of all comfort zones of the rich man’s infinite war machine; it is the tragedy which is as tragic as bitter realism can ever claim to be.

Truly, it’s official. If there is nothing like truth, then even post-truth is metaphysical, like a Nietzschean abyss, suspended in time and space, across a highway to nowhere, condemned and exiled at the same time. Indeed, if Aleppo is the post-truth, then the world is an eternal paradise.

One can mix page 3 celebrities, titillation, nudity, cheap movies and pornography, bombs and headless bodies, suicide bombers and jehadis, massacres of innocents and the latest La La land awards, and all the hyperbole at once can become a sublime synthesis of truth, as if Beethoven’s ‘Ode to Joy’ was never created, or no one ever listened to this magical music.

Life is not a glossy cover. Even a thousand lies could not make Goebbels a prophet of truth, nor did the concentration camps of the Holocaust vanish into the blue, however, blind the world became even as Hitler and his Gestapo enacted a daily carnage, and the packed trains to the gas chambers rolled across the lovely landscape and railway tracks of Europe. Till 1941, the US did not even enter the war. While millions in Soviet Russia sacrificed their life to defeat fascism. Can you count the millions of dead Russians? Anyway, neither war nor peace impacts the US, geographically, or emotionally. It is as distant from the truth, as is a prophet from a miracle.

So let the refugees roll in inside Greece and Germany, let Aleppo, Mosul, Palmyra, the exiled towns and villages of the Kurds, enter new margins of invisibility, let the war cry drown Beethoven, but, no, you can’t sacrifice the reality and turn it into a lie. Between lies and propaganda, the world is forever watching. And, documenting. Recording. Remembering. Like the remembrances of things future.

This is because, like post-modernism, there is nothing like post-truth. And life is like this only.

You hear the birds and the children play early in the morning, that is the message of the first light and dew drops of dawn. You live one day at a time. Life beckons. The lines on the broken face of Zakia Jaffri, and her relentless struggle; it is the resurrection of hope, even as the memory of Gulberg Society, 2002 Gujarat, remains etched in her mind. Even if the nation has been compelled to forget it. Like the mother’s mind in the movie: ‘Parzania’. Waiting for her son.

You cross the river across Kashipur’s tribal villages in primordial Kucheipadar. Tribals call it the ‘Kashmir of Orissa’ because of its untouched, primitive, raw beauty. You walk upon the waters, like Leonard Cohen’s ‘Suzanne’, and you become a stone, like the three stones as a memorial on a mountain where three tribals were killed in police firing, protesting against the mining of their beautiful land, forests and rivers in the Eastern Ghats.

There are flowers in their hair, as the Dongria tribes celebrate their bio-diversity in the lap of nature, the hot spot of ecological treasure, their homeland called Niyamgiri. They too hate the mining mafia and they are steadfast and they are refusing to move. Like the native Indians in South Dakota, in this freezing cold; they will have to do another genocide to move them from their totems and taboos, in this anthropological backyard, whereby all natives in the Americas were eliminated and butchered. Sacrificed and eliminated from the vast landscape, like a post-truth theory.

There are Dalits who have stopped stripping cow hide in Gujarat because they are protesting against the lynching of their comrades by Gau-raksha vigilante groups of the Hindutva hate brigade. They are marching across, singing new songs of liberation. There is Rohith Vemula’s mother, breaking barricades, holding hands with the young, her eyes as dark and stoic as the eyes of the boys and girls marching with her. She is refusing to succumb. She, like Najeeb’s mother, refusing to accept defeat. Or, death.

She knows. She, like all of us, has read Rohith’s last letter, his dreams flying on the wings of insomnia, dream and liberation. She, like his mother, and the students, are asking: Where is Najeeb?

Hyperbole and lies can become fake news, paid news, comfort zones; they can help create an unquestioned empire of ‘manufactured consent’; they make false prophets and messiahs; they can help win elections; they can bring in a pseudo acche din or ‘Make America Great Again’, or Hitler’s Holocaust Utopia; they can subsidise the corporate and billionaires; but they will never compensate the originality of the bitter realism of life, and the infinite tragedies, hopes and dreams it creates.

There is a rainbow somewhere hiding behind that back-lane of the slum where the poor are conspiring to become full-fledged citizens with fundamental rights. There is a story lurking in Abhujmarh in the thick, incomprehensible forests of Chhattisgarh, from where Bela Bhatia is refusing to budge. There is a dark narrative unfolding as a public spectacle when a woman strips herself naked in front of the Reserve Bank of India in Delhi, holding two demonitised notes, eaten up by rats perhaps, after trekking for days to get a little ‘honest, hard-earned’ cash to feed herself and her child.

Om Puri’s Aakrosh and Ardh Satya are not far away; they are out there in black and white, in that back-lane, like a dark memory chasing another memory. If this world is not changing, it must change. That is the truth and there is no other truth.

And, yet, barbarism is routine. It comes back in an addictive cycle, like history repeating itself. Human nature, is it forever and instinctively inclined towards the Hobbesian phenomena of the short, nasty and brutish? Is it the new normal to kill thousands in a gas chamber and then go for a picnic with wine and sandwiches with your wife and kids? Or, is it, as true as ever, as German philosopher Walter Benjamin wrote — he, too, tried to escape the Nazi machine, he, too, committed suicide: “There is no document of civilisation which is not at the same time a document of barbarism.”

Surely, it’s official. Nothing is ephemeral. In the age of post-truth capitalism and manufactured lies, neither barbarism and xenophobia nor misogyny and racism are dead. The Ku Klux Klan is waiting at the next bylane of history.

Nor is the idea of human liberation dead; the longing for love, beauty, idealism, freedom of humanity — that longing too is alive and pulsating. The dialectic is real. As long as the human and social condition remains unchanged, the struggle to change the human and social condition will continue. Hate or like, the cliché remains: Hope floats.