Our Responsibility Towards Our country

So many years have passed since India became independent at the cost of the lives of millions of people who nurtured a dream of living in a free country immune from all the evils of life. We got our cherished freedom from the British colonial rule but we have not been able to extricate ourselves from the tentacles of greed, irresponsibility, cruelty, depravity and poverty. We have created a framework of life where it is easy to deceive people in the name of betterment, selling the best of our clichés such as the elimination of poverty and ensuring the dignity of people. Our politicians, though not all of them, enriched by the support of votes as the inevitable process of the institution of democracy, go on a looting spree giving corruptions new dimensions of astuteness.

We sell the idea of making our country free from the scourge of poverty by flaunting statistical figures which have been deliberately distorted to give an edge to the claim of achievement. Even so many years after the independence, we have villages where people have to survive on the diet of the eggs of ants as the staple food. We let our famished children eat food with ravenous appetite as part of the bountiful midday meals to die leaving a blot on the tallness of our national pride. We have so many of our children being exploited as slaves due to grinding poverty even though there is a rule to check it. Our tiny adults from impoverished families are encouraged by their parents to be engaged in drudgery to supply fuel to their families. In villages many of them have to trudge miles to get drinking water from rivers, listening to the fairy tales of being groomed in schools.

When we are huddled together or in a crowd, we are mesmerized by our collective sense of indianness and we shout slogans ‘My India is Great’ but when we are alone in the gloom of our day to day existence, we have no choice but to ruminate on the nothingness of our existence, haunted by the memories of betrayal on a national level. Our political parties are keen on fielding candidates to win elections to grab power. They have proved themselves to be adequately cunning and comfortable to coalesce in the existing framework of power and politics. They have failed to evolve to address the problems of the people of the country in an effective manner and earn their trust due to their inability to look beyond the periphery of squabbles and inner party intrigues. They drag on holding on to shibboleths which they promote as their ideologies and enhance their political and money power.

We have achieved a lot in many different spheres but we have not been able to dispel the doom of being in the custody of corrupt people at the helm of affairs. India is posed for a role as a key global power but we have not been able to get rid of a feeling of indignity because of the shenanigans of many of our men in power. Trained in the histrionics of the leaders we have promoted, we have become accustomed to the developments that keep unfolding with an identical reality cutting across party lines.  

We have to stumble upon our daughters and girls ravished and mangled, sparking off an avalanche of sorrow. Before tears dry up, there is another scream of another rape. We are on the way to life, our leaders are churning theories, our men our being stylish, our boys are being too distant and our girls are living with fright. Yet with an indomitable urge for life we cannot but struggle to come out of the dungeon of darkness. We need to resolve to give up the limitation of peeping out of our claustrophobic existence to be expansive in the interest of those who have not been fortunate enough to be gain what we have at our disposal, the might of our education and our ability to eat when we are hungry. If our leaders do not evolve, we mush come forward to shoulder our responsibility towards our country to let every Indian know that he is not alone in the journey of life. It may take time but we have to achieve it in the interest of all of us and that of the glorious heritage we have inherited.