Lunacy

This is as uncreative as shots get - shooting the moon with a meagre 200mm.

Some of my co-workers find it most interesting to talk about the atrocities popular media reports all the time. The talk is mostly about crimes, corrupt politicians, terrorist groups and the like. I have been weighed down with a bit with work and haven't joined them actively. But it is interesting that so often topics like these are singled out for debate. Well, it's not exactly debate, it's more like selecting a set of facts that make it seem like we are up against a wall and wherever we go, there's a deadlock and we are at the mercy of an unjust system. It is about unanimously accepting our helplessness, which for some reason would give us the license to bend rules as we see fit.

Recently, there has be a lot of hue and cry about the insurgent Maoist movement. The Prime Minister has singled them out as the largest internal threat to the nation. Parts of the eastern region of India are rich in mineral ore(iron, bauxite, etc) and mining them comes at the cost of the environment and displacing the villagers. The GDP surges, the rich accumulate astronomical amounts of wealth, but given the power to misuse, the poor are hardly given their labour's worth. It is their poverty and ignorance that's used against them. A situation is created for the Maoist movement to become bloody. But unlike the way the government deals with external threats - by talks first - this situation is dealt with brutality. As Arundhati Roy puts it rather succinctly on her article in The Guardian "Suddenly, it's beginning to look as though the 10% growth rate and democracy are mutually incompatible."

There is a larger part of India we are hardly in touch with. Who have difficulties beyond what we might experience in our whole lives. In our busy schedules, an opportunity to understand and empathize with them is often impossible. But to know their reality is to realize that our difficulties are far too small to lose sleep over.

Another thing I find surprising about criticizing the government is the underlying hypocrisy. So many among us flout the rules whenever opportunity presents itself. In little matters like tax exemption for house rent, medical allowance, LTA and so on, many do not hesitate to produce fake bills just for a wee bit more money in their paycheck. Isn't that abuse of power too? Isn't that taking advantage of ignorance? Often, the rationalization behind this is that the entire system is corrupt, each and every person is making money through underhanded means, so what does anyone stand to gain from me being honest? Isn't it the same thing just on a larger scale that we criticize the government for? What is the guarantee that we would use greater power justly? Their decisions impact the whole country and ours impact us, and sometimes a only handful of people.

Perhaps even there's the matter of peer pressure. So often what we do is subconsciously dictated by peer pressure. Like wanting to buy a good house, or a good car, or spending a lot of time doing daily stock trading, to name just a few. The motivations in these cases are often multiple (even without us knowing). With politicians it could be about sending their children to the most expensive universities abroad, acquiring hectares of land and so on. If most of us were comfortable being original, the country would have surely looked different.

Anyway, my point is not that violence and corruption are justified, but more often than not, it is ignorance on our part if we believe we can accurately criticize and judge from a distance. These are the kind of problems we must look at both sides of. They must make us look within ourselves as well as without, because historically human beings have shown that they are mostly as good or as bad as their circumstances allow them to be.

Also, it makes me feel bad, this preoccupation with all the negativity. I wonder if things would have been different had we been living close to nature, perhaps in the hills. I'd truly like to believe it would.



Edit: Changed the title from "Almost Full" to "Lunacy" as per Adda's excellent suggestion.