As the Ravana. burns this dusshera.. it reminds me of one of the poems which i had read during my school days,
"Ravana Jalta fir woh bujhta ,, Isse Vjay kyu kehte bhai" It seems as though everyone and everything around me wants me to do something. You must have felt it sometimes that watever you see around makes you think of the same thing or person. What is around me these days ... "" wake up SID" & " a young girl shoots down a terrorist in J&K". &" karan johar saying sorry to a local leader for saying the name bombay instead of mumbai" & "the comparison of India and China and how we lag behind them.One of the news correspondent then says "has India come of age then?
'Coming of age'..what does this phrase mean to us in our daily usages??...it generally connotes a young persons transition to adulthood or maturity. So how do we decide whether one has "come of age" or not...is it purely a biological facet...if yes then how does nations and movies and books come of age? That draws me to another question..has India come of age????.
Well I have come of age as an individual. but have I achieved the same as a citizen? Do we show maturity enough to be known as a country of people who can handle larger world problems and do not wriggle over minor domestic ones?
India has changed, it surely has..from since the time of "hum log" on national televisions to now a day tweets and reality shows. We have and continue to grow our economy to one of the better ones in the world, we have our courts for the first time accepting homosexuality and sexual orientations as a right of an individual, we have, dear fellow countrymen, movies with not only bolder tastes but also a higher intellectual underpinnings, our cricket board is not only the biggest and the highest revenue earner amongst others , but it is virtually the one which runs International Cricket, we after 11 long years have again qualified for the Davis cup world finals, we have our own F1 racing team(please avoid being critical of its performance..its just a newbie), the success of Chandrayaan is known to all of you I guess...if not please update yourself from a few week's back news reports. So doesn't all this makes it very clear that we have come of age?
This was just one side of the picture wasn't it? There is wholly different India which we have quite ignored in the above mentioned picture. How can we forget that till now only 66% of Indians are literate( this when compared to the whopping 91% of our neighbouring Chinese friends..does throw us back into a retrospective dilemma).The democracy of which we all are proud of hangs its face in shame when not even 50% of the registered voters turn out to exercise their right to determine who they want to be governed by. Our national level politicians still fight it out on issues of caste and regionalism rather than propagating a philosophy of united India. We are still plagued with problems of poverty and unemployment. The worry is not about the problems...every nation has them..but the problem is that we remain quite unconcerned about them.( Whoa!!! did that hurt you!! if you dare to disagree then please think as to what have you done today or yesterday..or what do you plan to do tomorrow to help India counter poverty, illiteracy, child labour etc etc.) So to be honest we don't think and we don't even plan to think. Why so?? Is this the "coming of age " we have been talking about?
I think and ponder in search of answers....would be back with a few of them.
ok...sorry for being a little critical...but i guess it is better anyway than "awesome! good! great!" comments.
ReplyDeleteMy only problem with the article is towards the end. We are plagued with problems, agreed. But do you think it is possible for everyone to be concerned about them? It is great to be concerned about poverty, illitracy, child labor etc. But does it hold any tangible value in the lives and minds of the common man who has to fight in his daily life for survival? And I am not talking about roti, kapda, and makaan. The basic needs have become much evolved since then...
Well written otherwise :)
hey pulkit thanks :) :)
ReplyDeleteI agree its not possible for everyone to think about the world or the country everyday ...but i hinted towards was an absence of concern of something which we as individuals alos face. Lets for example take the instance of Corruption. i bet wud have faced it predominantly around your life..but have you ever thought of how to counter the problem??...and by countering i dont mean the problem at the individual level.but at a general level. Problems being faced at the individual levels..to be solved at the general level.
hope this satisfies your querry a bit. :)
Great Going BHATTA....off late it seems that the IT revolution has hit the NLIU campus...(with all the BLOGS floating around)
ReplyDelete(The only thing I fail to understand is how is this one "little more than just a blog") ;) (Believe me its just a blog...at least like "blog properly so called"… Austinian way)
Addressing the issue ..."Coming of Age"....whenever I think of this phrase in connection with India I get nostalgic wid the adds of Humara bajaj, Didika ji...koi yeh kyun le wo na le, nd the Iodized Namak...I accept your view that of all these years India has truly come of age from "HUMARA BAJAJ" to being "DISTINCTLY AHEAD", from "CAPTAIN VAYOM" to sending the "THE CHANDRAYAN" and from "AMIN SHAYANI" to "SHHHUUUD"
But I would like to put different paint to the brush with which you have painted the second picture...
1. We may have only 66% literacy but still we produce the largest number of graduates. (No questions on their efficiency!!! Because you never know the efficiency of those 91% literate Chinese either….it may be that they think that Koongfu training is equivalent to being literate and count them under literates)
2. There may be only 50% voting in every election but still democracy is surviving and there has not been a single attempt towards dictatorship.
3. Our political system may be driven by Castism, regionalism etc....but so does any of the so called mature democracies... say for example America...what we have here with castism they have racism. (Basically for me this is the inherent tendency with the democratic form of governance that it flows towards Majoritarianism).
I would not say that we are living in “shining India” but I truly believe that its “Incredible India”, incredible in its approach and incredible in its outcomes. So while we had half clad GANDHI to get us independence we have a full clad (Made in Italy) GANDHI to look for the unemployment through her dream NERGA…the same goes for every problem..there are people who are thinking and even formulate the plans, proposals and schemes... but…as per my thinking where we lack is the Implementation of those plans.
And that will be ensured only if people like u come into civil services…WHAT DO YOU SAY “INTERESTED???”
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ReplyDeleteSome great work there saurabh...
ReplyDeleteBut are we not trivializing the big picture here.I mean, just by saying that nobody thinks of it, wont help.We as a nation has this attitude of pointing errors and asking questions rather than providing solutions.And today I am ashamed to to say that even the best in our country(the youth of so called elitist Instritutions.)is just getting into the same age old mould of not providing solutions.
Moreover, Pulkit's comment here make me sad that at this young age he seems to carry no revolutionary thoughts of addressing this issue;rather he sounds as pessimistic as an age old man bound in a cycle of basic needs.
Well, simply put it like this, had all great leaders of the world(gandhi,mandela,king) would have thought like that,world wouldn't have been the same as we see it today.
So,we as the youth should just try to take ownership of these prevalent issues and resolve them or atleast spare a thought on resolving them.
@intello...
ReplyDeleteit is great to be optimistic and have "revolutionary" thoughts while turning a blind eye to that that is ground reality. I will not comment about Mandela and King, but you might want to read a bit more about Gandhi to know what he thought at such a young age.
Some cool misinterpretation of my comment done by you (i guess the elitist institution remark was aimed at me? :D ) And talking about sounding like an old man bound in the cycle of basic needs, I really wonder how many people at your campus leave jobs to do meaningful work and contribute to the society, because at our "elite institute", a large number of people really break the mould and provide solutions and not become drawing-room revolutionaries.