WE- THE PEOPLE

WE...THE PEOPLE

The funniest and disgusting   passive behavior of the INDIAN PUBLIC and the hyper active behavior of Indian Media has always perplexed common persons like me.    
Two years ago, the word "intolerance" was used by many intellectuals to criticize some dogmatic or dominant behavior of a select few. Every other TV channel was flocking with unknown expert speakers from various fields. They appeared to be working overtime / round the clock, in using their freedom of speech in the most liberal manner, thus leading to noisy chaotic scenes.

Our mythology and history have innumerable instances proving how tolerant we were. Lord Krishna killed his cousin Shishupal only after making allowances and forgiving his first hundred crimes .The other classic example is ....the great King Prithviraj Chauhan who let go of the invadar  Mohammad Ghori more than half a dozen times. In fact, it would seem as if the over tolerant nature of us Indians , was more of a problem Intolerance did not seem to loom anywhere in the horizon of their behavior.

Hence it appears pointless that there should arise a need to debate on the ‘intolerance’ issue as we Indians are inherently and agonizingly over tolerant.  The Hindu religion has  accepted and accommodated  many new things and customs with open mind.   If new ideas were good they were adopted and if the new ideas were not unanimously acceptable, they were  just subtly ignored but never vehlemantly opposed, thus still giving a choice to people to adopt these ideas as per their reasoning.

I recall an anecdote related to Swami Vivekanand which will be quite apt to mention here. Once Swami Vivekanand was traveling in USA with some missionary. In the course of their discussion, the missionary mentioned the commonalities of all religions were,telling the truth, honoring elders, helping the needy etc. He went on to ask Swami Vivekanand about the unique feature of the Hindu religion. Swamiji quickly responded " In my religion I have the freedom to criticize and even abuse our own God ...... Give me a crowd of ten, hundred or thousand and I can criticize our God and still be alive and in one piece......This is just not possible in any other religion!"

This could be because we do not take many things seriously and let go defaulters with our ‘forgive and forget’ attitude. Maybe this leaves ample room for others to misinterpret us and over a period we are called cowards.

Self-proclaimed intellectuals criticized the protest against the artist who deliberately or inadvertantly hurt feelings of our religon. And mind you this artist is one who choosed to sketch nude pictures of Goddess Sita and Goddess Saraswati. And their logic is, it is modern art and an artist must have freedom of expression .It was argued that some  people are unnecessarily over reacting and are intolerant ! 

 Unfortunately, the media supports such stupid  intellectuals and a large portion of our population, though fully convinced that artist is at fault and should have refrained himself from displaying such art, choose to keep quiet.Some even take stand that we should ignore such things else there will be tension in two communities.

What is true for religon, FC is equally true with all other matters be it: flouting traffic rules, littering our surroundings, contributing to increasing pollution, wasting our dwindling resource - water, eve teasing, child labor or poor governance and increasing corruption. If someone breaks the rules or commits a crime, in nine out of ten cases, offenders are ignored or can easily get acquitted. All this happens for the want of witnesses and / or proofs against them. We don’t consider that  it is our responsibility to cooperate with the police and help them solve cases and punish the guilty .We happily take more pride in criticizing the police force and the Government for their failures.

 We choose to remain passive when we witness some incidents of eve teasing on the road or ragging in the college campus or child labor in some factories or road-side dhabas or  car garages. The media is only bothered about increasing their Target Rating Point (TRP) and end up taking the side of those entities to whom they have sold their souls.

Everyone needs fresh air, potable water, clean roads, fast and safe transport, unadulterated food and so on. All these are not only our basic needs, but we consider them our rights. At the same time, we have a firm belief that the sole responsibility for providing them lies with the ruling Government! For the past several years the blame game is going on, but we have not made any progress in terms of any solutions. 
We are happy when the Government who passes some regulations or laws. Then a few of us immediately take it upon themselves to dissect the same and find loop holes to exploit. Yet others applaud/appreciate the intelligence of law breakers and blame the Government for not framing proper rules. If the implementation of law is ensured strictly, again there are sections of society that curse the law protecting police for atrocities and demand justice for the law breakers. Some of us merrily blame persons sleeping on the footpath more vehemently that the drunken drivers who run over them . . Here the argument is that the public footpath is not meant for sleeping ! When it comes to economic offenders, we blame and criticize more intensely, the authorities who fail to catch them rather than the criminals because not enough care was taken to prevent the crimes. When it comes to loss of lives of innocent victims of terrorists, human rights activists choose to remain silent. But they never shy away from  making a hue and cry whenever any terrorists are gunned down by our army. The human rights brigade and criminals are good in manipulating the media to glorify criminals and maximize their TRPs.

Democracy gives us freedom to do as we wish. Sadly we take pride in breaking rules by violating the traffic signals/rules just because we are endowed with freedom of movement. We have no qualms overtaking from the left instead of  right side because we consider ‘might is right’. We are not necessarily prompt in completing the Pollution Under Control (PUC) test for our own vehicles, but never shy away in blaming the authorities for air pollution. We hold the traffic police force responsible for not ensuring discipline on the roads and the moment the authorities get strict they have to face protests for the harassment of general public who are rightly fined for not wearing helmets while  riding two-wheeler, jumping red lights or over speeding.
The media again criticizes the Government for heavy fines imposed on law breakers but the media does not utter a word on why the laws are broken. The reason quoted is heavy fines for traffic rule violators will increase the corruption !

In our country authorities are always criticized irrespective of they are doing or not doing their duties. By doing so the general public feels that they are responsible citizens and protectors of democratic rights of thousands of innocent people. 
Who are these innocent people? Innocent people are those who always suffer, and they are in vast majority. Sometimes one feels that they deserve all this suffering for their inactions and passive or submissive behaviour and tolerant attitude.

When people return from  places like Singapore or Hongkong they merily sing praises about the cleanliness, the stringent laws and regulations that are the driving force in those places. Once at a railway station, a friend of mine was engrossed in praising the Singapore administration and suddenly, contrary to his words – he spat out on the platform leaving a red blotch on the clean platform. He was chewing 'paan'. When I protested, his  audacious reply was "India me to sab chalata hai yaar.... Singapore me to paan hi  nahi milata." (Anything and everything is fine in India, my friend; ‘paan’ (betal leaf) is not available in Singapore.) 

I recollect an article by the famous author, journalist and a multi-faceted personality, the Late Mr. Khushwant Singh which was published in illustrated weekly way back in seventies. The article was titled "Chalta Hai".

The difference between attitudes of Indian citizens and other country residents is "India me chalata hai" and in other countries "nahi chalata".

When it comes to safety, quality or women's dignity, we Indians have very high tolerance  levels ... those who don’t tolerate are criticized by intellectuals for their reactions even though they are right . Sad thing is people who dont tolerate are in gross minority and the
majority prefer to be inactive and passive and remain silent spectators.

Unfortunately, those who follow the rules are considered fools and those who break ghe rules  are considered smart !

Even with such a situation, things are improving but at snail speed. No wonder we required more than 60 years after achieving independence to emphasize usage of toilets and to stop open defecation.

Sometimes I wonder how our country is managed considering the passive and over  tolerant behavior of majority of the people.I have a strong belief that there must be  the GOD or some super power who is running our country. The reason "Why we are progressing slowly" is perhaps we are tolerant and satisfied and have this laid-back  "chalata hai" attitude for all apperantly small but very important things.We in fact also take pride in self-criticism or self-flogging but beyond that we continue to remain passive, ignorant and tolerant.

The great Abraham Lincoln said in 1865 that the Government in democracy is “of the people, for the people and by the people”. So, when we blame the Government, it all comes a full circle and in reality, we are blaming ourselves. We know all our rights but we either don’t know or ignore what are our responsibilities. We conveniently choose to ignore that “Rights and Responsibilities are two sides of the same coin.” It is high time we learn our responsibilities and only then we should  talk about our rights .
 The foremost act required is “we must shrug our signature “chalata hai" attitude.This is definitely possible and immensely necessary for our nation building.

 If we dont correct ourselves  then who else will ?

 If  all of us understand and always remember " that Improvement starts with " I " then the things can change .
One only hopes they change quickly !
~~~ R. J. Phansalkar
        December 8 ,2019






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