Narendra Bhai Modi takes oath for the office of the Prime Minister today. India is looking forward to his tenure, as the expectation is that he would take the country out of muddle and disorder. The muddle and disorder is driven by deeply ingrained thoughts and beliefs that would need to change and weeded out. Quite likely we as Indians would have to fight battles of the mind to overcome or surmount the challenge we face.
To put this into perspective we could safely say:
“Once the center for commerce and innovation, India is lagging behind in its former glory and the task ahead is to achieve its initial standing from where it can progress further. However, the minds of the people and the country are contaminated now and the epidemic is spread too far and deep for mere economic reforms to bail the country out. There is required more than just an open economy for India to sustain and regain its past glory”.
Some of the that would need immediate tackling would be –
- Economic Development, Income Inequality & Quality of Life: Enough has been written on this though as a citizen I would like to state that every single day we struggle with the basic necessities of life. Water, power and food are still unavailable to some while a majority of the population is sustaining in rationed amounts of each across the country.
- Social Structure and Feudalistic Mindset: Years of servitude has taught the Indians to listen but killed their thought process in the bargain. We do not require a country or an authority to enslave us anymore. We are deemed a free nation as per our constitution but the roots of slavery are deep. We now need our independence from the enslaving thoughts, institutional structures etc. What it seems that we are getting intellectually colonized and need to fight the syndrome to be independent in thought, action and deed.
- Education System: Our school systems are creating mundane workforces of androids who can rote learn but not question. Innovations and creativity come at a premium in India. Our mindset has become feudalistic in nature where people do not wish to think for themselves. They exist in a pseudo environment created by the self and for the self. They are secure and content in it and refuse to benchmark themselves on the global scales. The call is to dismantle the edifice of archaic thinkers within the education system and shun them out.
- Cleanliness: Indians are hygiene-loving people and clean their houses every day, sometimes multiple times. However, we don’t think twice before flinging a wrapper outside our house, car or maybe urinating in public. Small indifferences to the community cleanliness translate into apathy for the country as a whole. The issues are multiple i.e., one of attitudes and the other of not having the right sanitation facilities.
- Corruption and Crime: India was a dream more than a nation. However, soon the dream became economically enslaved and socially bound. Corruption replaced socialism while a new monarchical law was established by the covert feudalistic mindsets of the political parties. Equality lies in shambles while justice is lying sealed in the innumerable cases with pending decisions. Nothing remains of what we were and we don’t know what we have become. The nation that probably tops the charts for crime against women, exploitation of people etc. The nation that was formed on grounds of truth and compassion suddenly finds itself in a widening gyre of crime and corruption and the reasons become more apparent as we question our ethos.
- Duty of Citizenry: Our nation suffers today as we have forgotten the importance of respect as a duty and a virtue. The community suffers from indifference and ennui, the source can be understood somewhere in our lack of respect for life itself. People die in large numbers in India but nobody would bat an eyelid for them. People are prepared to turn their backs on their communities and we are coming to exemplifying this behavior by turning our backs on everyone.
To put this all in a perspective, we as citizens have a certain notion of the expected and the anticipated. Their perception is slowly turning towards an economically advanced country but amidst all the cacophony of growth there exists the real India, which is slowly degenerating into oblivion of what it was. The country envisioned by the likes of Gandhi and Nehru is suddenly blurred in the light of mediocrity, hypocrisy and corruption. Law holds little value and values form no law for the people. Our inherent defaults and our adulterated edifice of existence are showing signs of a fatal epidemics spreading faster than we can realize it.
Published with Yahoo on May 26, 2014.
