Mountain of light

 

It was the Independence Day last week and since then, I have wanted to write about the state of my country as I see it. I mean we as a free nation are now 60 years old and now is a good time as any to talk about where we are now, where we are headed etc.  The thing however with talking these days is that no one seems to just talk. Everyone is out to impress her opinions on you and at any cost. So they will shout you down, flood you with information that takes weeks to digest, anything to prove that they are right and you are an idiot if you do not support them and an even bigger idiot if you do not have an opinion.  

 

It is very unfortunate that this is now the standard of public discussion in this country. This very country whose first Prime Minister, Nehru, quoted Voltaire "I disapprove of what you say, but I will defend to the death your right to say it." The standard of discussion whether it is with our politicians, media, various interest groups etc is now so bad that I can’t remember the last time I saw/read a good debate. Yes, we have a Parliament where good debates should be the order of the day, we have a media that is constantly interviewing experts from across the board, plus we have discussions with our friends and acquaintances. Increasingly I find these debates are becoming useless and one sided. Either you just hear one party or the debate has degenerated so much that it has become a shouting match. It is the same in Parliament, in the media and increasingly so in my day-to-day discussions with people.

 

People are increasingly bringing their pre-formed opinions and biases into their discussions and refuse to even listen to the other person. Even if two people are on the same side, they still end up trying to outtalk each other. So much are we in love with our own voices and opinions. This is exactly the sort of bias I now increasingly see in television anchors who sometimes end up talking more than the interviewer and keep interrupting him in the middle to prod him to the answer they feel that their viewers want to hear. I am ok with that as long as the anchor is well informed about the subject in question but that is very rarely the case.

 

I wonder where are we headed with this sort of behaviour. We constantly criticize the US for being too self-absorbed but I think we have all the makings of a self-absorbed nation ourself and God help us if we become like that. For all our talk of India being a great civilization, a melting pot (ok a salad bowl), unity in diversity and what have you, I do not even want to think where this path will lead us too.

 

Jai Hind.

There was once a little boy who always wanted to grow up and do what big boys do. The boy was shy and was afraid of talking too much about his dreams lest someone make fun of them. So he kept his dreams to himself, maybe write about them in a journal. He dreamt about what he would do when he grows older, how he would face the world and live his dream. It was all very clear to him then on how things would be when he became a big boy. He had a few friends but no one really understood him, he was a geek at best and didn’t really fit into any of his peer groups. All this made him feel that he was a misfit and he started to seek out other misfits.

 

One day he did grow up and become a big boy. However, the world around him was still very strange and suddenly he didn’t want to do the things that he had dreamt he would do as a child. All he saw around him were things that he couldn’t bring himself to associate with them. He saw values that he couldn’t imbibe, he saw dreams that he couldn’t share, he saw actions that he didn’t agree with and he saw those actions bearing results that he never imagined. He saw himself in a world where everyone played by a set of rules that were foreign to him. It is a game he doesn’t understand. Maybe he understands but then he can’t find any other reason for not playing this game, so not understanding will do for now. He couldn’t believe that he has co-existed with these people in the world for all these years, yet the more he co-exists with them the stranger they become, and they do stranger things. Then he noticed that his mind was starting to play games with him. He started to see things that no one else would see. He began to see a method in the madness and started to see sinister plots behind seemingly harmless things. He thought he was going mad, surely no one else was seeing what he was seeing. If they were then why would they go about their business like nothing else matters?

 

This was not how the little boy had imagined life would be when he grew up. So sometimes, he goes back to his old diaries and realizes how pointless it all is. All those dreaming of the big boy days seems so childish and life at that time would have been much better spent living the day rather than dreaming about the future. So the big boy with all his infinite wisdom now tells himself to learn from this experience. Except, now the past seems so much more wonderful. What is it with him that he can’t bring himself to live the present. It is either the future or the past. Why is it that he does not understand that all his answers are in the present, in the now? All he needs to do is to stop dreaming, open his eyes and look at them. Embrace the present, as the new age gurus would say.

 

The question is, does he want to do it?