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.

Wednesday, 26 January 2011

THE REPUBLIC OF BHARAT? – कहीं कुछ खोता जा रहा है!

Welcome to the Republic called India that once reflected "Bharat" too. Most of the things happening here these days seem to undermine its democratic institutions.

This kaleidoscope of paradox seems to get aggravated when we see another S Manjunath incident revisited. What else can we say on goons burning alive an official who caught them red handed during a fuel heist? The feeling of loss exacerbates.

We’re living in an effeminate sort of country where at one hand, we want to feel proud of it, but then we come across factors that make us creep inside an escapist shell, we hesitate, restrict our thought process and that is so spontaneous that it forms the wider psyche of the population. Here there is no discrimination. See, feelings leave their game of betrayal at bay at times.

We need to accept its getting scary when every other institution seems to be flawed. Last year saw malaise and corruption sweeping every nook and corner. The only hope is you and me. But are we there? Largely we are a disgruntled lot driven by some common good propagated by some uncommon courage thanks again to the efforts of some common men inhabiting both the “Bharat” and the “India”.

What is the most important asset in a democracy? No doubt, it’s you and me and collective “you’s” and “me’s” are pinning hopes on the Indian youth. But we are yet to begin and remember this is a lot with fractured ideals, shoddy upbringing, conceited opinionating, crushed identities, compounded by a manipulated aimlessness.

The wide youth base being propagated as the next big thing in “India’s” projected growth is a dissected lot with most not yet knowing what they are to do. Let’s begin with the clear writing on the slate that the “India” doesn’t want to see and the “Bharat” doesn’t bother anymore – the “have-nots”.

The widest base of the “have-nots” even boasts the good percentage of Ph.D. holders but they are totally rubbish. They are product of an educational system that is so archaic that nothing can be done. They are so uniformly distributed that they have their presence everywhere, big metro, cities, towns, villages. This is the biggest factory system in India where resource is wasted to create more waste. The low quality output gives the industry a hunter to tame the talented folks who genuinely aspire for more.

In the stark contrast, there is the elite educated class always ready to take wings to an alienated soil to go totally aliens. Pity India!

Juggling in a land of “nowhere” comes the lot of sophisticated and half-baked products. Though they have everything from avenues of education to choosing on career streams; yet majority of this enamored minority lot is non-sensical enough to understand even the basics of the “Bharat” and the “India”. This is the so called uber cool urban youth with polished tongue from metros and small sleepy towns with some metro lineage, busy networking socially with all their big debates and concerns ranging from their understanding of things, to the objects of “nowhere” to their bawdy expressions and public displays of intimate things like relations and love. Silly fellows!

The real minority is those who stay here and really want to make good use of their education. They, somewhere, imbibe traits of all the lots discussed above but the real differentiator here is their better understanding of the concepts of the “Bharat” and the “India”. It lets them grow holistically and they are better able to use the tools that all other lots just waste.

So indeed it is scary. It is up to us, the youth to become a bigger voice homogenizing the concept of the “Bharat” and the “India”. We need to become a collective lot to carry forward the “uncommon work” of the “some common men”.

Hope humanity is going to find its way and there is an India somewhere in the making that will truly reflect the "Bharat" ending this perennial dichotomy. Let’s not forget our emblematic base of the illiterates and have-nots, drawn away from all the access points of even the “Bharat”.

Till then it’s "गन"तंत्र vs "गण"तंत्र, the battle Armageddon with intensifying feeling of loss!