A very close friend of mine finally returns from the US of A. I am so much excited to receive him at the Chattrapathi Shivaji International Airport (yes...he promised to bring me enough chocolates to last a fortnight). The following lines more or less encapsulate what he speaks after landing.
“Enter the airport and the place looks and smells like a railway station. The immigration staff is old and disgruntled, probably just hating you to return from a foreign country of which they’ve only seen passport stamps. I get to the carousel dodging hateful eyes one after the other, only to be greeted with power surges and non functioning air conditioners. Even a person with Zayed Khan’s IQ won’t believe that this is an international airport.
I get home on a prepaid taxi, where my luggage is shown utter disregard ( I myself vouch for this). After an hour of dusty air and not so welcome smells when I sit back on my couch and wrestle with the remote, it suddenly strikes me that standard of living is not really the biggest problem that India faces-it’s the standard of thinking that is”.
Now it’s my turn to think further (yes, I love thinking for my country).Why should we become the superpower at all when media houses are shoving down nonsensical and puritanical thoughts down the deep throats of the empowered and independent women of this country all in the name of entertainment? I am a strong believer in influence of media on the progress of a generation and the way it stands now, I see the current generation nose-diving into an ocean of crap. What happened to the ‘Hip Hip Hurray’s and ‘Just Mohabbat’s which positively influenced children about friendship/love? When did weather report of a sunny day become ‘Breaking News’? Is the current generation so troubled by life that it needs a senseless piece of crap like Dabangg to make it smile? Is their life so colourless and bland that it needs the perverseness of Bigg Boss to make it a day? Is this generation so stupid that it is unaware of the repetitive storylines of soaps?
Just because Indian pockets are financed by the western world doesn’t make it the next superpower. At heart we are still a bureaucratic country which idolizes movie stars and cricketers, a country where marriage is still viewed as a union of two people of opposite gender and same caste, where for every wannabe ‘Raja’ there is a collection of boot- licking ‘Praja’, where opening 10 multiplexes in a square kilometre makes us feel modern and world class.
We Indians need smaller egos and broader mindsets, we need to value creativity over donkey work, we need education that makes us think rather than mug, we need to cut the crap on “Indian Culture”, we need censorship on media for “indecent mental exposure” and “violation of mental sanity”, we need to break the shell of self conceited patriotism, we need leaders rather than rulers, we need some drastic change out here.
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