Jai Ho!!

I read this article the first time without any association…the second time I read I thot c’mon don’t be a snob …and the third time I read it..I was like..yeah if not all perhaps I too agree to most of it..

Its true that how much ever we claim to be patriotic and feel for our country we do feel impatient and irritated when we are asked forcibly to stand for the national anthem before every movie that we go to see…so much so that I have seen people and I for that matter have felt relieved umpteen no. of times when we reach for a movie late and discover that all that singing and standing drama is over..

Me and my husband happened to go to a restaurant yesterday to celebrate our second wedding anniversary…no sooner had we finished our soup and starters that a huge group entered the restaurant celebrating the birthday of an aged person…and the birthday celebration instead of being in honor of the person in question was a kind of promotion for some trust …speeches about life, religion, country, blessings of God on the trust and so on….our perfect dinner didn’t seem any more perfect now…instead of enjoying the food we wanted to just gulp down something and escape from all those speeches…And to come to think of it had we stood up and opposed to the noise we would have been beaten up black and blue not only by the people from the trust but may be even by the public for interfering with a sacred function like that in praise for our country, religion and what not…..

But it makes me ponder…if people have so much time and patience to attend such gathering or sit through such speeches and promotions in the corner of a restaurant and not oppose for being disturbed how come all this patience disappears when they are driving on the roads or boarding local trains for that matter. If you choose to drive by the highway from Navi Mumbai to Mumbai Suburbs in the night…definition of night starting from say 9 P.M or so…you definitely skip one or two heart beats hoping to reach home in one piece…the vehicles just zoom past in zig zag ways with no signal whatsoever…nobody even casts so much as a glance at the traffic signal forget about following it…and the worst being that even if you intend to follow the traffic signal you are forced to move ahead due to blaring honks at you for not moving on…Sometimes you even wonder if by any chance you are invisible to other people driving past you conveniently without taking any notice…totally oblivious…I understand if someone tells me that they are selfish..they don’t care for others…but I fail to understand…the least one can and should do is care for his/her own life…and how is that not happening..

Service rules…I thot of writing an entire post on it someday..I don’t understand when an Airtel/Vodafone sales executive asks me with utmost surprise “How is it possible ma’am…someone should be at your house on a working day…How can no one be at home”…And with even more surprise “How can you not have a middle name”…I don’t understand how the same stringent rules keep sending you bills and don’t disconnect your connection if your address verification has failed…and how do people who just give their friends addresses or are kept in their company hotels get their residence address and everything verified and get away with things so easily….And I better not get into the way passports and driving licenses are made….The worst was when my mother had to make her passport…she is a housewife and in those days marriages were not followed by marriage certificates and no she didn’t have a driving license or a ration card in her name….so all rules imply that she can’t have a passport…unless some bribery is paid to avoid all these questions which lead to one another without having any solution..

And there is more….the eve-teasing, the rude way in which people behave, the bloated egos everywhere…..can we blame it all on education…even if we do…then how come education in India is not anywhere near any kind of development except for the quota issues and issues and debates on building more IITs and IIMs….but the question remains…we may build more institutions…we may have more reservations for every caste, creed, gender….but what will it all come to when the sole imparters of education are frustrated beings targeting their frustration at the students ….all those who have gone for higher education in India will definitely agree that those two/one year of PG had been a torture and nothing else…..and all those who had been preys to the various universities for their graduation not being able to get some good pvt institutions or the IITs and escape the torture…especially those who didn’t want to do engg and MBA and follow the Bandwagon and had different career interests…my salute to them…(more here , a blog post by someone who was a prey) …In most of Indian institutions more than half the professors are uninterested souls who could do nothing better and landed up in the field of education for a steady income…the rest are those who consider being in the profession of education as a fixed income source and all their attention is how to bag bigger bucks through consultancies…..just a handful of them are those who are wholly and solely dedicated to the field and the entire country is thriving on that handful……It could be because education is a field claimed to be the most important and at the same time the least paid…..hence the least sought for Job in our country…..

So, does the blame shift to politicians then….or the bureaucrats ….aren’t they just people like us…from our community…they are bestowed with some power which they misuse and so do we…How can we blame only them when starting from a pan wala… reducing the content of the packets and selling things in loose as well as selling the original packet at the same price, to big business tycoons…. playing around with their financials cheating on the shareholders,to students in colleges…. copying in exams , plagiarism and buying degrees, to employees who stealthily make use of company resources to make free STD/ISD calls all misuse their power to the extent they can…and everybody thumps their chest and raise their hands when songs like “Jai Ho” play…and also go to the extent of creating a hue and row over as to why did the movie Slumdog Millionaire show India in such a degraded form ….

So no use blaming…no use complaining about people spitting, passing urine and littering the place because even you have thrown wrappers and papers umpteen no. of times outside on to the roads from your window because you didn’t want to litter the car…No use blaming the person standing next to you for disturbing you talking loudly about his her pvt life on the mobile phone because even you too do the same may be without even realizing whom you are disturbing..

No wonder…the few individuals who cudn’t take it any more decided to leave to other countries and ofcourse there are those who escaped the torture to pursue their career in other countries and started calling themselves foreigners referring to Indians as “you Indians” instead of “we” and bloating their egos further for earning in foreign currency…upholding India…upholding that very rotten attitude because of which we are in this state….the self pride and false ego… which all of us are probably moulded to develop here taking us and our country only to its peril…Yes, all of us have bloated egos…each one to a varying extent…that’s why we see scenes like some customer shouting on the top of their voices…ill-treating… infront of everyone at the waiters, servants, airhostesses, receptionists, subordinates …anybody and everybody who come below them in the economic hierarchy with or without there being a fault in the first place….that feeling of power kind of gives us an empowerment which we need from time to time to feed our ego so as to be able to take the blow from our superiors…and the irony is everyone keeps complaining “Nothing can happen in India without yelling”!!

All this only implies…we need a change…a huge change…change in the attitude of people…because although the economy of our country might be in the developing state we the people are still in the under developed state….And for the country to get into a developed state the people first have to go to that stage……and that will take ages …may be a lot more generations to come ….to see India develop in the true sense someday when people really and truly are happy standing for their patriotic national anthem playing before them…otherwise India will reduce to the state of villages…just like people had migrated from villages to cities in search of a better life everybody will migrate outside the country to live a better life and give an easier life to their children…