Can someone ask Kiran Rao and Aamir Khan where is 'elsewhere'

Where is "elsewhere"? Aamir Khan says Kiran Rao wants to move elsewhere from India. Several of my American friends say, if Trump somehow gets elected, they will be looking to move elsewhere. A few artists and academics I know in Israel, Turkey and Egypt say the air is choking with rabid extremes. New post-apartheid South Africa seems to be struggling to get to some sort of equilibrium. Much of Europe is boiling. Russia's czar wants to send certain people to God. China will do anything in the name of Confucius, on its own terms. 

Where is this elsewhere? 

The empires of the futures are the empires of the mind, said Winston Churchill.  Perhaps, we are all heirs-presumptive of our desires. This is a time of global readjustment at a tectonic level. The relative calm and artificial stability worked out after the Second World War, and the eventual unipolar politics of the final decade of the last century are gone. The peaceniks are alarmed, for Emmanuel Kant's formula of perpetual peace is an ever-receding ideal, a foundational European colonial venture at its core. Yet, indigenous alternatives, instead of being able to communicate with other cultures and modes of operation, are turning inward with their own nativist and expansionist ambitions.  Untrammeled realism struts.

The dream to escape real time onslaughts in life and travel to some never-never land will continue to chase us. But it is a doomed venture as long as it operates as a stuttering, piecemeal reaction. It would then start as a hope to be free but soon begin to yearn for the opposite of freedom: security. Security too, in an accelerated world, has been a fantastic trompe l'oeil. Our middle class hope-to secure a golden land for our progeny away from the bombers and schemers of the world is a fairy tale told many times.

The great philosopher, Ernst Bloch, who wrote a symphony on "elsewhere" and called it The Principle of Hope said that our little day dreams and wishful and wistful images of the fulfilled moment are bound to turn inward and become tragedies of our own imaginative lacuna. Instead, he talked about an anticipatory consciousness which will act rather than react.

But should not the desire to travel elsewhere become a projection of a vision of a future kingdom of freedom - a conviction of our collective consciousness - rather than an idle, selfish reverie to escape our conditions? After all, a vast majority of our fellow beings have no escape hatchet or safe haven that they can even dream of. It is, perhaps, never a bad idea to first confront our realities, and then stand up to them. With imagination and dreams. Only a realist assessment of our present conditions can make our idealist flights to elsewhere lands more durable. For a new, still-to-be-born world order beckons us.

We must be equal to its challenges: life is really not elsewhere, after all.