We, The People

With all those glorious forecasts made about how great the future of India is and all the history rammed into student's impressionable brains of the Freedom Struggle year after year, with all the crap that Bollywood keeps churning every week (with a narcissistic Mayawati building another statue of herself!) I sometimes fear if we are over-complacent during these turbulent times of global political and economic change.

A niggling thought at the back of my mind says that my fears aren't entirely baseless.

Take for instance, our respectable neighbour country who can't seem to figure out where to accommodate their humongous population, and begins to eye our soil. Yes, I speak about the North-Eastern limb of India which is under threat today, from the shrewd Chinky Eyed clan whom our politicians still want to refer to as kith(Remember 'Hindi Cheeni Bhai Bhai'?)

Pretty laughable that the world's fastest growing economy has such moral standards. But sadly, our own reality is even more shameful which may lead to another disastrous, not to mention dangerous, barter.

Who really cares?

For you see, the territories in question are not any of the metropolitan cities. Neither are they important trading ports of economic or strategic importance nor are they famous for historical monuments or authentic Indian food. Actually when you think about it, even the religion practiced by the majority in these areas is extremely tolerant and has almost never been the cause of communal conflicts. The Indian Government is known to wake up from its slumber and act, only when aggresion and violence shake the nation.

Does this follow that we fail to offer protection to the North-East Indians, who are as much Indian citizens as the Bacchans, just because these people have never aggressively demanded anything from the Government? Do we watch while their homes are taken over by foreigners who hardly care about the people and whose only intentions are to illegally usurp land that belongs to us.

Click on the link below, to know what I am taking about:
http://secrettibet.rsfblog.org/archive/2008/02/06/why-are-we-scared-of-china.html

I am not going to rant here about how inefficient our Government is or say that our corrupted politicians are behind every mess. Apart from being redundant and mundane, those reasons are irrelevant today. At most, I can call them excuses.

The fault is ours, yours and mine. We, the youth have become used to lead plush, comfortable air-conditioned lives, dreaming only of cars we would one day own and all the money that would make us rich. To the point now that there is little room in our imaginations for anything else, except us and our wretched relationships.

The leaders of our country are, to put it in plain English, old. It is ironical that CEO's and CFO's of corporations and banks are all smart, self-motivated individuals (who turn eventually turn into highly competent leaders by the stroke of a magic wand called yum-bee-yay;)) while the foreign policies and decision-making about the nation's boundaries are left to the care of wobbly legged, soft-spoken gentlemen, albeit highly qualified, noble and respectable(and I am referring to gentlemen from all parties: Ruling, Opposition, Left, Right and every other in between).

As senior citizens they are supposed to be more bothered about their health than anything else. In their youth, as budding politicians with patriotic zeal in their hearts, they did their duty by taking initiatives to bring about change. (The fact that their aspirations either never materialized or took completely different proportions is a different story)

But the point is that at least in those times there were a quite a few of them who thought about the country. Most of us are not even bothered today.

This blog is a not-so-gentle reminder for all of us that the blame game might have brought us this far, but it will not work anymore. If we do not sit up and act now, we might not have a country to live in. We all know that a section of the Indian population with Swiss accounts stashed with money and mansions in various countries of the world, will flee away to safety in case of an emergency(it's called saving up for stormy times in Microeconomics). Our World-class soldiers will lay down their lives for us up to a point after which our homes would be danger. Why wait till then?

Let's Cast that vote. Lets be more Involved. After all it's our country.