Random Thoughts
Oh! India, My India!
It is very easy to criticize everything in the country right from politicians to the roads. I myself am guilty of such a modest crime. People modestly talk about all the ills shrouding the country without any solutions of course. The solution is left to the next person, the neighbour or the friend or the bystander on the roads.
It is very easy to ask questions where there are no answers. We have developed a special expertise in this. All the ills of the country are of course due to politicians; mercifully we have come to the conclusion that some of them are not that bad after all. So, we sit in our pedestals and pronounce our grave verdicts everyday. Nothing works in this country they say and nothing will work. True, but why don't you work a little more friend? Media persons will flay a politician or a bureaucrat. But the action seems to be in the speaking and not in anything else. Vacuous statements however truthful they may be really does not help matters.
On July 9th 2012 a young lady was publicly stripped of her honour in Guwahati but most of the passers by were mute spectators. And the temerity of it all is that in some quarters the girl has also been castigated, for going to a bar. We have double speak and sexist attitudes to life. If we cannot get rid of such unbroken fallacies which we are mired in, then we will continue to live with double standards and paradoxes.
If everything is wrong in the country, then why do we accept our fat salaries especially in the Central Govt. services? When it comes to accepting them, the arrears, the Leave Travel Concessions we don't deign to proffer our grubby hands. But we will stigmatize everyone, the government, and the administrators.
What about punctuality in offices? What about staying back in colleges or universities to extend helping hands to hapless students? What about casting a second look at a beggar, and not throwing a coin out of abject disgust? How do the railways run, the post office also for example? I have much more faith in the Speed Post services of the govt. than in most of the Courier Services. Some of them don't even bother to deliver letters, and call you up, asking us, the payers to collect the documents. Isn't this effrontery?
When we complained about govt. services, we said privatization was the answer. Now that multi - nationals and the corporates have made an intrusion, providing the youth with jobs, we still strike plaintive notes, saying that they exploit. The fact is that each individual educated citizen is not introspecting and is feverishly trying to climb the rungs of the social ladder.
We have no qualms approaching the same politician for favours whose category we despise while putting ourselves on high horses. And now that the President has been elected all the responsibilities of the nation seem to fall on him. The social responsibility that corporates talk about is something abysmally lacking in the Indian consciousness. The buck is passed on to the politician or the bureaucrat, something many of us could not be even if we wanted to.
I am sick of this blame game - blame ourselves first and look at the poverty around us. We needed a Steve Waugh from Australia to feel for our neglected children. What are the other cricketers who wallow in luxury doing? What about the sportsmen, are they given the same kind of public ruckus which we cover the cricketers with?
26-Jul-2012
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Ananya S Guha
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