A quest.....

In the midst of the midnight hour as I walked down the lane to the campus, I was lost in the profound sea of interrogation and the waves of uncertainties. It is not surprising as they often come to me more especially in the times of solitude. I stirred my conscience as I went by and looked at the sky in to the space and gazed the moon. It was bright and beautiful.I wanted to look beyond that brightness but it didn’t really allow me to. Perhaps, the eyes are incompetent to look beyond. Perhaps, they didn’t want me to.

But a few drops of dew did add to the sea as those questions visited me again. I felt as if they waited for that particular moment to come. I wondered, who are they, where do they come from? Do they live in the “Dhabas” of the metros where a helpless minor works all day long so that he/she could ensure his bread and butter the next day, or does it come from the pessimism of all those young people who simply try to keep aloof hiding behind the curtain of pragmatism? The youth, who are suppose to be the leaders of tomorrow, who are suppose to shoulder the burden of a Country still struggling to free from the chains of neocolonialism?

“Nothing can be done”, I was shattered and could never dare to forget those haunting words which were not merely words but the hope of a youth from one of the premier Institutions of education. I saw the courage gradually succumbing to the duress of helplessness. Youth; the hope of a nation, of the poor, of the exploited and all those millions of people who believe in their prowess, in their ability to change the status quo and bring about a revolution of the progressive ideology in the society.

Far across the realm of idealism perhaps, the reality is as horrifying as this. The individualism is manifesting itself in the alienation from the society and its values. Is this the kind of society we are aiming for? I don’t know the answer. Do you??

Human Resource???

The naked dance of an ism, unfettered from all sorts of moral edifice. Though, it masquerades itself with the much idolized concept of “Human” yet blatantly inconsiderate and callous towards the simple little emotions that constitute human values in actuality. Quite a few from that school of thought may argue in affirmative about the worth of the human values, but I think they need to understand the underlying objective which has been very obvious in the recent economic crisis when thousands of employees have been retrenched and whose lives have been sacked, indifferent of their well being in particular. I wonder about the ism because it does demonstrate diversity in the form of inequality, manifesting itself in different shades of the society i.e. the rich and the poor, the high and the low so on and so forth. However, it does have one single parlance and i.e. of maximum profit with minimum investment.

Well, here lies the key to this discussion, “maximum profit”, an ambition which has no real boundary and therefore is an unquenchable thirst. My cognition fails to understand the symphony of the awesome and the gruesome i.e. “human values “and “maximum profit” going hand in hand. The commodification of human beings has invigorated itself in such a way that it has engulfed everything out of them only to make them a real machine whose worth is valued in terms of mere tangible outputs. Somebody amongst the realist thinkers said that human beings are basically selfish in nature. By and large it is true and therefore, we can imagine the result when such selfish creatures are left to grab the maximum out of any resource, which unfortunately in the ism, is also applicable for the human beings, and hence the name human resource.

I feel sad when I see the human relationships gradually getting transformed in to monetary relationships and resulting in the formation of a less human society. It is already happening in many developed countries across the globe wherein the monetary relationships have manifested itself in to an individualistic society and also gradually stretching its arms in the developing countries. I think that human beings, without the element of human values are just like machines and am afraid that this race for a limitless goal will perhaps, snatch away this invaluable virtue out of them………

Cogito Ergosum

A drop in the ocean, an atom in the universe, an experience in a lifetime may mean nothing when seen superficially but we forget that the real power of the very same single little thing maketh the ocean, the universe or even a life. We tend to see what is existent but at the very same time neglect what is non-existent or at least seem to be non-existent. Stars are bright little objects in the dark sky. A human eye can admire the aesthetics of a bright clear sky with several little twinkling stars. But, unfortunately nobody admires the darkness without which stars have no meaning of their own. There is a need to question things, to look beyond the boundaries, to break away the shackles of the unknown to admire what is neglected, what we don’t know.

Lord Acton said, “power tends to corrupt and absolute power corrupts absolutely”, but do we ever think what makes it true, why power corrupts? The moment we talk about the corruption of power, we make a serious fundamental attribution error to the same. The term power in itself is a very relative concept which depends on the degree or extent of the powerlessness of the people. In other words the concept of being powerful is inversely proportional to the state of powerlessness. When we say one is powerful we also have to understand that the other is weak. So when we question power being corrupted don’t we forget to blame ourselves for the occurrence of the same? We forget that somebody dares to exploit us because we let him/her exploit. Who is responsible?

India, a nation with the GDP growth close to the double digits, a nation ranking 8th in the number of billionaires, the largest demography of an ambitious middle class in the world, a nuclear power and as anticipated, soon going to be the most powerful nation state in the future . Wow! Wonderful!!
But have we ever tried to understand, what does the notion of development is, to a man who is not even sure whether he will be able to get stomach full of food the very next day? The man I am talking about is not a single man but 270 million people of India who live below the poverty line or more than 770 million people who spend less than Rs20 per day ( Arjun sengupta report). I am sure that each and every single man mentioned above looks ahead for a life which is ensured of social, economic, political and above all food security.

Again, who is responsible? Isn’t it we, the common man who definitely failed to check the holders of power to act in the most efficient way, to act for the inclusive sustainable development of the country? Worse things happen because we let it happen; we don’t even bother to question just because it happens to our neighbor. But we forget that even we are also a neighbor of someone. Having 2.4 million places of worship may or may not be bad but having such a number when the number of schools does not cross 2.1 million, is definitely a matter of greater concern.

We talked about the shining star in the beginning and also about the much hyped shining India cocept. Well, although both are shining but there is a fundamental difference between both of them. Darkness for a shining star is a boon but for a country like India, it is nothing more than a mere curse. The agentic state has to be shunned rather everyone has to stand together to prove their mettle and let the contractors of the nation know that we are not and we will never be a mere silent spectator of the whole episode. I, the common individual with you, am an entire population, a single drop which can maketh the ocean of an equitable , just society….Amen