We as a country have numbed down.
The politicians, out of their own wily designs call it a resilient spirit. They fool us out of their obvious incompetence, and confuse us with a helpless courage with which they credit us. What
we are is a citizenry which has lost all hope, and which is as trivial and
useless as the leaders that govern it. A soldier was killed in UK and it
created a global furor, with the UK PM condemning the incident and the
governments across the world coming in solidarity. The following week six soldiers were killed
and we greeted the news with our usual silence. It is not only about the
governance, and how far in their incompetence the leaders will go; It is about
how far we as citizens will go. The killing of soldier was not only marked by
the PM of the country coming in to condemn it and getting visibly engaged right
till the funeral. It was also marked by thousands who came out on streets to
grieve the dead soldier. We are a dead society led by a dead leadership. We
treat things which others across the world find condemnable and worthy of
society-wide disgust as usual and then do not seek answers from the leaders.
It is neither our innocence nor
our nobility which keeps us quiet. It is our shallow selfishness as a
collective which kills us as a nation. On Thursday, my five year old was out to
her dance school. She was late to return by thirty minutes, as it turned out,
on account of the School Van breaking down. I went out in Pyjamas downstairs to
her school, which was walking distance from the residence. I walked with a deep
sense of remorse and guilt of not being able to drop her myself to the dance
school and an unnerving fear. However, she turned up at the door right then,
with her smile and two ponytails, dancing on that beautiful head. My worry,
guilt and nervousness were washed away by the sudden sense of relief. My daughter came back, angelic and smiling, but soon I was to learn of twenty three kids who were to never return home from their school.
In the evening, I
watched the Television and was hit hard on the consciousness with the News of
twenty three kids who died of poisoning of Mid-day Meal served by the government
to the kids in the government school.
The midday meal was initiated by TN government, though some say inspired
by few schools in Saurashtra, in 1960s later on adopted by many states and
mandated for by the Supreme Court in 2001. The scheme essentially provides food
to kids when they attend the schools. The schools in turn get the food from the
NGOs, many of them being second refuge of scoundrels, the first being politics.
The scheme was introduced and let to be run on its own without monitoring and
governance. That is where a money-making opportunity was discovered by the
people. The relatives of the school authority provided the ration, often of
dubious quality which was paid for through government subsidies. The pattern is
common across the country without any centralized, well-monitored procurement
of food grains and other ration which is used for preparing the food for the
poor unsuspecting kids. The scheme has been fraught with scams for long, which
included poor quality food, government provided ration being diverted to
private traders. The leadership as usual, runs the who hog of insensitivity,
from thwarting the well-meaning directives of courts as interference into policy making,
then bound by regulations and stuck in the middle by public visibility
implementing it, and thereby claiming the credit for it, and the allowing the
scheme to wither away and ending in a
squalid mess by exemplary administrative sloth and disinterest.
We can blame the government and then
go again in 2014 voting for the candidates basis the caste and religious waves.
Are we such self-centered idiots who are left with no trace of conscience left
in our conduct? Our kids do not understand religion or caste, and they are
doing before they could understand anything because we understand nothing but
religion and caste. We are a decaying society not because of poor governance,
but because of our own stupidity which allows this poor governance to
propagate. Market surveys show that kids education and kids product are a high potential
market. Not because the kids are going to walk into the malls with loads of
cash and spend it on themselves, but because we as parents are going to try to
provide them with the best that we can provide. But that is about things, what
about the country that we are going to provide to our kids when we are long
gone? Are we going to let our kids be ignored by the governance, getting them
dead, maimed, raped in the country simply because they cannot vote. To protect
the young, all living beings bring out all the weapons which nature has made
available to them-vote is our weapon, aren’t we going to close our eyes and
think of the twenty three dead in Bihar school and Gudiyas of the world and then
think of our own kids before approaching the ballot box? Are we going to listen
to what the kids with their big, loving eyes ask from us or are we going to
listen to the frenzy created by caste-leaders and religious leaders? We owe
this to our children. We must remember, to quote Oscar Wilde-“Children begin by
loving their parents; as they grow older they judge them; sometimes they
forgive them.” Will we be forgiven by our children for the world which we leave
for them? We embrace our kids closely as we watch the father of a girl breaking
down on Television, remembering who his daughter asked for two rupees before
going for school and could never return from the school to get it from her
father, and we are sad and guilt-ridden with uneasy conscience, but is that
enough? For how long do we live with shifting responsibilities and denials? Are we going to demand election manifestos to spell out what plans in concreted framework terms they have for our kids, or are we going to still allow our own fears and insecurities to dictate our actions?
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