Ever since I can remember being aware of our world’s population, the magic number I needed to know was six billion. Initially, I could not begin to grasp what that number signified, or how it was applicable to my own life. On the day I was born 19 years ago, there were approximately five billion people walking the earth. Millions of strangers going to school, finding jobs and living lives that were resigned to never cross paths with my own. I suppose I never want to indulge in pondering the enormity of the human race for fear that it will consume me completely. My philosophical musings are put on hold as less abstract tasks take over my life.
Consequently, as if a rubber band has been gently tugged and suddenly released with a resounding snap, I read and re-read a statement released from the United Nations: October 2011 will be the month the global population hits seven billion people. Is there a specific date predicted? Halloween is aptly set to coincide with humanity’s reproductive milestone. Cue an array of predictions dictating apocalyptic ramifications and environmental chaos. I feel my jaw drop and my eyes widen. I think about millions of sidewalks lining seemingly infinite streets. I think about how none of these strangers I had ever seen walking those sidewalks looked or seemed identical. Seven billion variations of the human body. It was as if everything seemed to have turned upside down. I made peace with the inevitable: Change, whether good or bad, is coming.
Every minute I spend composing this column, our world’s population increases by approximately 158 people. For two young girls included in this statistics 12 years ago, life did not pursue an anticipated or expected path. Irina and Anya were both born in the same Russian maternal hospital 15 minutes apart. However, they were each given to the wrong family upon their departure. They were now in the hands of a cruel twist of fate. This error only resurfaced when Irina’s mother endured a difficult divorce and was eager to ensure her husband helped finance their child’s future. She turned to DNA analysis to strengthen her case, but the results were a shock to all. These parents found that neither of them were related to Irina biologically: she was not their daughter. An investigation brought the two families face to face to meet their real daughters, born over a decade earlier. Amidst the tangled wreck of emotion and confusion, four minute specks on a giant carpet of six billion people managed to overcome an accident and uncover a shocking truth. Despite a polarity of cultures and upbringing causing friction between the two parents, two young strangers have been drawn together in rare circumstances. Perhaps whilst my world had been turned upside down, unwittingly theirs had returned to its original position.
Change. Once a word heaped full of promise and aspirational fulfillment, change has now descended into an overused political buzzword that has lost its way. However, there are few exceptions to such a bleak outlook. IBM’s former global sales chief Virginia Rometty has been named as the company’s new CEO, a change that will come into effect in January. This may seem an arbitrary story; a heavyweight promotion is usually announced, celebrated and then gradually forgotten as operations return to normal. A pattern altered when this shift signifies the first time in IBM’s history and one of the few instances in American corporate history, when a woman will be at the head of an immensely powerful technology company. In a field previously dominated by males, could this be the emergence of gender equality on an unprecedented level? Hundreds of years after business and commerce were initiated, maybe pencil skirts and trousers can co-exist in the same high-powered boardroom, egos pushed to a far corner and out of sight.
Life as we know it rarely falls according to our original plans. Whether we have absolute control or not, we take it upon ourselves to scramble all the pieces of our own puzzles, desperately searching for a perfect fit. Only rarely do we realize the likelihood of us having these pieces fall into place around us, but we just weren’t looking at them the right way. In a world inhabited by seven billion human beings, this will pose a greater challenge than ever before. Grappling with concepts of purpose and what one person can do when dwarfed with sheer numbers is equally difficult. Maybe we need stories of estranged daughters navigating different lives to be re-united once more to realize our world is only as vast and daunting as we perceive it to be. On Monday night, the Northern Lights, technically referred to as Aurora Borealis, were visible from Oklahoma, Tennessee and Georgia. Even in nature, our world literally seems to have turned upside down. There is a possibility that lost daughters finding opposite parents, women climbing corporate ranks in a ‘man’s world’ and northern lights appearing in the south, illustrate that life upside down maybe isn’t such a bad idea after all. Although, with news of children potentially possessing credit cards, maybe some changes are better left untouched.
Sofiya Mahdi is a sophomore in the College of Arts & Sciences and a weekly columnist for The Daily Free Press. She can be reached at sofiya21@bu.edu.
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