Thursday, August 25, 2011

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I am Anna,who?

I was walking down the street adjacent to the Regal in Mumbai when a procession passed by with Nehru topi donning youngsters shouting slogans in support of Anna Hazare. A curious onlooker, conspicuously foreign, asked a young couple standing next to him, who this Anna was. That charming lady responded after stammering and faltering for a couple of seconds,picking up whatever came to her mind,"He is a Freedom Fighter". Unable to see some person from outside the nation form an opinion on how ill-informed our youth is about matters pertaining to national interest I pitched in and explained to him what this whole ruckus was all about.

In the dark and for how long?

That young lady,I had referred to a while ago is a precise representative of how we are. No, she was not extolling Anna, she was ignorant.So, is everyone among us.We are the youth of the nation,we love slogan shouting when we are in a mob,we love to be herded,we don't reason,we don't debate!

Any voice against the government would sound euphonious to us and if it is a peaceful war cry,as is the case now,it would enspirit us to no end!Anybody(that would be like saying everybody) who knows the prosopography of this current young generation would tell you that sporting the currently concupiscible Nehru Cap would appease the fob in them!You could as well spot people fighting for that cap when the media is around.We have aggression, loads of it but this is uncalled-for aggression.As in this case, the reason is justifiable but directionality and intent are flawed.How many know who or what they are supporting?Anna or the Jan Lokpal Bill?Wonder how many of us would have actually read the draft or even gone out for an open debate on the issues and implications of it.We would rather go out on a protest,shout some slogans,wave that flag,update our Facebook statuses or display images, but not debate.If one has the right to fast then he has the right to formulate his own opinion which might be open for speculations.Branding anyone who chooses not to go with the mob as 'not a "pure" Indian' or a traitor is as foolish as terming one person who did not stop his bike and dance when India won the World Cup as a Anti-India! You not supporting Anna does not mean that you support corruption, you might be against the concept of holding the government for ransom or the fact that you feel that establishing a Lokpal would create a totalitarian monster in the name of fighting corruption. I must have asked at least 20 people if they know the difference between the Lokpal bill submitted by the government and the Jan Lokpal bill and the only answer I got was 'we support Anna, we don't want corruption'.

Faux-Gandhian

Not to launch a personal attack but as many pointed out,though his means are Gandhian, Anna’s demands are not, his modus operandi has been questionable in the past,on many counts!Be it support for forced vasectomies as the only method of family planning or flogging people who used to come home drunk or supporting Raj Thackeray's xenophobia, the list goes on..

Why he did he never come out and support the plight of Vidarbha or any other case that needed immediate attention? Did he need time to fletcherize his ideas and think of something that would get the eyeballs? The palingenesis of Kisan Baburao Hazare as Anna Hazare is an entirely different story. He is no saint nor are the people in his so-called self-proclaimed “Team Anna”, sample Kiran Bedi, she has always been known for leaking official information to the press, abuse of power(fight against corruption, eh?),instigating junior police officers to defy administration,attempts to disrupt the President's visit among scores of others and as was pointed out by one of the journalists, sure, no one is perfect. And people should indeed get a second chance to redeem themselves. But this always comes with a pre-condition: admit your sins first, and then atone for them. Kiran Bedi has not done any of that. To exonerate Bedi for her transgressions would be nothing short of self-indulgence.Decentralization of power would have never been consistent with what any great leader would have ever demanded,let alone someone like Gandhi! You could not have easily gainsaid whatever we knew of his past or of the people in the Team Anna. We are not realizing that this is a coup of a different sort, might be not military but yet more potent, for it has started in people's minds.


Wildfire

I was just surfing through the channels on my TV when I paused at one that read “We kiwi Indians support Anna”, funny as it might sound, there are people from all across the globe esp. from the United States and the UK. I wouldn't have thought about it till AR pointed it out here. The campaign is being run by NGOs which have been generously funded by some of the leading corporate houses. Kabir, for example, which has the Magasasay award winner Arvind Kejriwal in the Governing body had been receiving largess from giant corporate bigwigs like the Ford Foundation to many other small time organizations. This protest seems to have made way into their respective CSRs as well. They are throwing out fistfuls of lagniappe towards them and it is getting redirected towards fuelling a single person’s whims and fantasies. The whole labyrinth seems so byzantine, there is something runic about the whole affair!Why else is it that Irom Sharmila’s ten year fast doesnot gain currency and headlines whereas this does. Just because we are still not sure of how to deal with the states in the North East India, as usual o

r is it because it did not have the support of these money minting houses. Or even the fast by

one Nigamanand to stop illegal mining on the banks of Ganga in Haridwar. We would never even have heard of them.Then there are people who want to generate positive awareness among the junta. With an irenic spirit they join the debate, at times ugly and vicious but we would not want to listen. You might see this as a fresh start but what we should do is just start by finding out the reasons and rationale behind whatever you voice your opinion about. With so many indices and surveys telling us where we stand as a nation, in terms of corruption and other worse things, such a bill which gives the ombudsman the power to prosecute and punish would been seen as a desiderata but also think about the repercussions that any such bill might cause. We are a mighty huge nation and also considering the fact that passing of a bill from the houses in the Parliament is therefore dilatory. Everything that we, the youngsters, the future of India support should be properly debated, discussed and then demanded for.


 

The Edge Of Reason| by KK