The best way to know the self is feeling oneself at the moments of reckoning. The feeling of being alone, just with your senses, may lead you to think more consciously. More and more of such moments may sensitize ‘you towards you’, towards others. We become regular with introspection and retrospection. We get ‘the’ gradual connect to the higher self we may name Spirituality or God or just a Humane Conscious. We tend to get a rhythm again in life. We need to learn the art of being lonely in crowd while being part of the crowd. A multitude of loneliness in mosaic of relations! One needs to feel it severally, with conscience, before making it a way of life. One needs to live several such lonely moments. One needs to live severallyalone.

Monday 5 August 2013

WHY IT IS REFRESHING TO SEE DURGA SHAKTI BECOMING A RALLYING POINT AGAINST THE POLITICAL HIGH HANDEDNESS

It is refreshing to see someone like her becoming a rallying point against the political high handedness and the incumbent corruption.

What lies beneath cannot be said but what is evident from the goings at the moment is she is an honest and dynamic Indian Administrative Service officer who is being hounded by the political ego and elements of corruption in Indian politics.

It is encouraging to see the symbolism reflecting in her victimization and the subsequent media and political uproar because it is not what the activism norms in India elicit.

In fact, it is still premature to term it as activism.

But it is good to see an anti-corruption symbolism in her for the reasons that push us to think that we need to raise voice for her; that we need to raise voice against the wrong; that we need to protest.

Any such symbolism, any such issue is a desperate need in India of the day – a democracy reeling under increasing political apathy and chronic corruption.  

Dots are just small points of reference but they add up to form a line and so the larger frame of reference to mobilize support over an issue. Her case represents one such dot that could be a reference point in fight against corruption owing to its uniquely placed thematic elements:


She is a not a corrupt bureaucrat: Indian bureaucrats are notorious for their elitism, social alienation, corruption and insensitivity. So, someone from this class standing against the norms of bureaucratic corruption and norms of bureaucratic machinery in India is refreshing.

She is a young bureaucrat: Though there are no set benchmarks on which age-group people are more corrupt, it is the common and the right observation that youngsters are relatively purer and so better than the middle-aged and the elderly in reacting honestly on the wrongs in the society. Only an honest reaction on something wrong can motivate to act further to have a corrective action.

Certainly, Durga Shakti's act is thought-provoking for many youngsters including her young colleagues in the bureaucracy.

It is foolhardy to think that her case is going to change how the bureaucracy and the polity function in India but it also tells us the younger and the purer thought in an otherwise rotten Indian bureaucracy is not fully dead yet.

She has stood her ground in the worst bad land of Indian politics: Anyone who knows the functioning of India's bureaucracy and polity understands that she would be under immense pressure to toe the government line, even at the cost of becoming scapegoat to satisfy political ego and political corruption. But she has stood firm and that too in the badlands of Uttar Pradesh, a graveyard for issue-based politics. That is certainly encouraging.

Whatever happens to the outcome, but it certainly tells the spark is there. Let's see when the fire is lit. Let's work to light the fire. 

©/IPR: Santosh Chaubey - http://severallyalone.blogspot.com/