News and I.

If you are one of those people who likes to get up in the morning and read the newspaper with your breakfast like me am sure, the start of your day is with a barrage of stories about banks being looted, innumerable comments or tweets from slandering each other in preparation for the general elections or women and children being raped. Stories of human deceit, rage, deplorability and dysfunction spread across for our personal consumption to make what we want of it.

So, one would expect outrage over such negativity but in my opinion, we have got so conditioned to receiving news that we have all become highly adept at attaching filters to every input of information. Parameter being just one-does it concern me in any way. We have all made a small bubble of our own existence in this world with our families, our work, our entertainments, and our issues that make it almost impossible for us to stick our neck out for anything.

If any bit of news does not affect us directly it is either the problem of our government or the problem of the opposition, or the police, or the MCD but never ever our problem. This passivity on our behalf accounts for one of the weak links in our democracy, we do not ask any questions and therefore expect no answers.

Would anyone in our country be put through such a public scrutiny and accountability as Mark Zuckerberg faced in the United States of America over the privacy row? Do we not have a right to know what goes on behind closed doors and why a very famous man who got convicted in a very public case for 5 years was let go the very next day.

India is a country where all the illiterate followers of a baba will burn down buses and cause damage to life and property; trains and traffic stopped for the sake of communal issues. Contrasting to this no one will unite and come to the streets for protesting over a little girl’s plea for justice against heinous crimes as we have jobs and only one Sunday.

Our politicians are all high and mighty with the power of position to warm them, if we were to mobilize ourselves would we not garner enough attention to question the people forming the government, their qualifications for the post and the work they are doing. Do the tax-paying citizens of our country (the whole 1.5% of it) have the right to sit on the appraisal of all the mantris whose salaries they are paying for.

I feel we do not need to be social activist to affect change but an awareness is needed of being part of a community, which extends beyond our family and their needs. We are all guilty of inaction and the only people who benefit are the communal leaders who push their own agendas while we choose to turn our backs on the real issues of progress with equality for all and opportunity for all.