'India is my country and all Indians are my brothers and sisters...'
This is the opening line from the school pledge most of us must have repeated umpteen times back in school. Back then, it was just another ritual which was to be performed in the morning assembly.Now I wonder...
Woke up today to the newspapers screaming about the serial blasts in Delhi. Times of India's first line on the article says,'It has become nauseatingly familiar'. I guess that very much explains it. Five blasts over a span of fifteen minutes, and life for hundreds,maybe thousands, would never be the same.
After every such incident, and there have been quite a few in the recent past, our reactions range from shock, fear, outrage to indifference, in that order. The question is, what next? Is forgetting things and moving on the only way out? Can we, the Stupid Common Man, do something about it?
Saw A Wednesday. And yup, the title's from that movie. Everywhere I go, be it in the office, the malls, on Orkut, I hear many of my friends say that A Wednesday is actually what is required in India today. They may be right. I don't know. It was a movie afterall.
'We are resilient by force, not by choice', Naseeruddin Shah says in the movie. But is it really so? I mean, all of us, we have been taught to adjust in life. If Ariel is not available, Surf Excel de do. If we don't get admission into engineering, we adjust and take a diploma instead. The point is, we have been taught that adjustment is the only way out. And that I guess is one of the many reasons we have become so resilient. We say to ourselves,'Another blast, OMG, I hope everyone I know is safe', and then we adjust the incident in our memory like some piece of cheap cargo stashed into the corner of a cargo van. We are resilient because we think we do not have any other choice. And people are taking advantage of this mindset of ours. But what these 'people' are forgetting is that, just like the incident, this cargo is also a bomb, ticking, biding its time...
Anyway, Ganesh Visarjan processions doing the rounds in the city today. Pune is on high alert, owing to the incident in Delhi yesterday. By the way, came to know from Mehul, my flatmate, college mate and one of the few guys who actually love reading newspapers, that the Ganesh Pooja ritual was formally started in India by Bal Gangadhar Tilak as a means to unite Indians during the reign of the Britishers. Nice but strange, isn't it? That a religious ritual like this was used as a tool to unite Indians. Afterall, in present day India, religion is simply modified, mutilated and reduced to the bone of contention for almost all issues concerning the country, political or otherwise.
Anyway, the question remains unanswered- Can the Stupid Common Man do something? I tried to ask this to myself, but am as unsure and confused as always. Signing off for now.
2 comments:
Naseeruddin Shah is right in saying the words "We are resilient..." Most of us today want to do something against the terrorist activities. But each of us has a higher level of tolerance as compared to say, the Americans. Since as far as our history books take us, us Indians have always tried to make settlements, compromises and sacrifices. That is how we are, the peace loving lots. That is just what makes it even more tough. After all, this is just my view.
You are rite. But the fact remains that, as u say, we 'have always tried to make settlements, compromises and sacrifices'. That's what I mean when I say that we have been taught to make adjustments all our life. I guess both of us mean the same. Anyway, thanks for the input.
Post a Comment