Friday, November 28, 2008

Bombay Burning
I have been watching extremely disturbing and horrifying images of our jawans from police and security forces fighting an unknown enemy for the last three days now. My heart goes out for all those innocent people who have lost their lives without any fault of their's and for those who have lost their near and dear ones.Today the whole nation is shocked and repulsed and apparently stands united but we know it as a fact that the collective memory of public is supposed to be very limited and in this country it is surely much below world average. In the recent past also we have been witness to many a terrorist attacks in quick succession in various cities and towns in this country but they are or have become just news items for most of us and life goes on as if nothing ever happened. People who lose their lives become a subject of discussion in drawing rooms or over drinks and that's where most of us end our reaction/action. People don't seem to get moved by anything over here long enough to push them in to taking some tangible action to force the government to change the way they govern.It is absolutely right that we get the leaders we deserve and we are actually being today governed by leaders who are representative of a morally corrupt, indifferent, insensitive, self seeking and brutally competitive society. Whenever there is a crisis we all start talking about the systemic problems that our society is faced with. The media especially various TV channels start falling over each other in pointing out what is lacking and what needs to be corrected. However with utmost disappointment I have to say that they forget about all the systemic rot as soon as they stumble upon a new breaking news. They very clearly seem to be only in the business of selling news and have no long term plan to ensure that enough information and awareness campaign is launched to take any issue raised by them to its logical conclusion.Another aspect I thought needs mention is that when we speak about the inadequacies in any system or any institutional framework we convenientally forget the people who man these systems/frameworks. We might improve our systems but we will get no where until we as a society change. At the end of the day it is not only the system but the people who are responsible for making the system work that would deliver. Therefore the problem before us is not unidimentional.We can say it with a lot of conviction that all political parties in this country are the same and largely made up of same profile of people and shall unfortunatelly continue to be the same till the feeders of these parties. that is the society, takes up the challenge as a whole and shows some willingness to change themselves. We need to be less indifferent, less insensitive, less inactive, less self seeking and a little less inert at individual levels before we expect something dramatic to happen and if we really want things to change for better in this country.