“There is no one out there reading your story. There is no one who will take a step because of your story. It is just a numb, self-absorbed world that is slowly consuming itself, from light to darkness, from darkness to darkness” – Kota Neelima in Shoes of the Dead
Although these words are from a fiction novel on farmer suicides, they could well be a factual statement of India today, of the uncaring and comatose educated classes that comprise the cities and towns of India. This is not just about farmer suicides – but about everything. Just about everything. Our sickening carelessness and chalta hai attitude, our selfish I-Me-Myself approach, our total disregard for our duties as citizens… our total inaction, and indeed collusion, in corruption is a case in point.
Words fail me… I am searching for words for perhaps the first time in my life at this uncaring attitude of Indian Citizens. The total disregard for the massive challenges that face India today- corruption, energy, agricultural problems is shocking. No one seems to care. It is considered a matter of pride if you have bribed someone to get something done; the honest people are termed “chutiyaas”. This is itself a scathing indictment of our society, and the failures that we have become. Any society that regards the honest man as a fool needs a serious correction of its moral compass. It amazes me that people regard giving a bribe as a given, and pull up people to stay adamant on not bribing. Instead of holding such people as examples to be emulated, they are termed fools! And for the educated from India to do this is a travesty of the word educated - education gives a person the ability to think; jobs give a person the power to say no; and yet - we see India stripped naked every day.
It further amazes me that we are so caught up in our own lives that we fail to see the abject poverty in our villages and even the urban poor. We have become so hard-hearted, so uncaring that the difficulties being faced by the poor sections of our society do not even register in our landscape and world-view. We have a massive mal-nutrition problem; we have some of the poorest people on the planet living in India. The very mechanisms that are designed to alleviate the lives of these people have been conclusively proven to be ineffectual and full of holes – and yet, we, the urban elite, do not see anything beyond our traffic congestion, our GDP growth numbers, Inflation, etcetera.
There is little genuine pressure on anyone in the system to bring about genuine change. No one is being questioned on the failed PDS, no one is being questioned on the plight of marginal farmers. There is little genuine honest effort being made to eradicate corruption… it is as if these problems just do not exist for the educated elite. It is almost as if there exist 2 Indias – India and Bharat. Neither can see what the other is hankering about. A sad state of affairs indeed – when India does not even bother to read about the problems of Bharat in the news – as evidenced by the lack of a national dialogue and serious pressure on the government through the Media. The silence is profound… India cannot see what Bharat is going through, India is blind, deaf and dumb on any issue that does not effect India. It is almost as if Bharat is populated not by humans, but by some alien species…
The reality of Bharat is too brutal to contemplate; but you wouldn’t know it from an Indian. After all, the Indian is not Bharatiya. He / She is only an Indian… India and Bharat… the two will have to meet if we are to make our nation what it once was: Aryavarta, The Golden Land. But without India waking upto Bharat, and re-aligning its seriously distorted internal moral compass, there can be no hope of that happening…
As I always say,
Jaago Sonewaalon!
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