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.

Thursday 5 September 2013

POLITICAL REFORMS: STILL ABOUT RHETORIC AND EMPTY WORDS

Writing about this problem doesn't make any difference on its state of perpetual apathy. The almost of who are in the fray are beyond redemption. They all are same under the skin, an illicit brotherhood to further their common interests.

Ignoring or maintaining a distance from the epidemic cannot help either. It is heading for a systemic failure and the best fight back to it can be while being in the System, while being a part of it.

And so, the fresh thinking and new entrants with a vow to fight the wrongs in the System are in urgent need.

Sadly, that is not happening. Reform, there, is still about rhetoric and empty words and even the beginning of the process, that no one can decide, define or conceptualize, sounds like daydreaming.

The grip of rotten values and insensitive politics has spread so deep and wide that it rapidly co-opts almost of such entrants. Those who still maintain the stand are made ineffective, cornered or wiped out.

If we look back to gather some names in the recent past, when the process of deterioration has frighteningly speeded up, we don’t find any.

But even if we go back into the history of the post-independence India, we don’t find many names. All we have is apolitical Vinoba Bhave or social and political icons like Ram Manohar Lohia or Jayaprakash Narayan.

But continuance of Congress as the major political force in India, during and after them, and its sustained rule even after the Emergency of 1970s tell nothing much has moved in the name of political reforms in the country.


Initial days of post-Emergency period did give the nation its first non-Congress government but it fell owing to its own fault lines. Worse, many of its firebrand leaders are prominent politicians today, comfortably co-opted by the brand of politics that has come to be known as insensitive, corrupt and increasingly dictatorial, a brand of politics commonly associated with the Congress party.

Recently, after over three decades of the days of the Emergency era, we had first genuine hopes for Political System reform when the country was swept by a huge anti-corruption mass movement. Though it was urban in nature, its wide base and self-propagating nature told there could be some leaders from the movement, who if took the political plunge in future, would be serious players to reform the Indian politics.

For some time, Arvind Kejriwal or even Anna Hazare (in spite of his age) looked as probables for the alternative to today’s politicians. But, the way Kejriwal looked in haste and split with Anna Hazare to form his political outfit was shadowy.

Now fully in politics, he is yet to reach out to tell us if he is different. Only time will tell about it but his ‘could not rise to the occasion’ performance on two of the recent anti-reform and anti-democratic moves by politicians to scuttle the Supreme Court decisions on electoral reforms and to dilute the RTI Act, disappoints. There are clear and pertinent risks of him being co-opted in the future. 

Political reforms in country have lingered on for long. Except for some high points, there has not been much to talk about. But, at the same time, the need for a political alternative is more desperate than ever.

And it has to come from within only, from this rotten System only. This System has to be won from within only. The need to fight back the rot is more desperate than ever.

BUT HOW? No one can decide or define it.

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