Time to educate

Time to educate

There is chaos everywhere or chaos is being predicted everywhere. Or is it just a figment of my imagination? A year since I have written my last public post, a year since the same day last year, a year in which I have exercised little control over what I needed to do. Time to get back in shape.( I am looking pretty good in the mirror though). Time to wrest control. Not surprisingly, I find that I am not the only one who needs to take stock of things. It is everyone of us. Wondering how? Continue reading.

Look at India. I thought there were enough things that were out of control and penned down quite a few articles and spent a few sleepless nights on how to get these in order. We have a new problem now. New states. I dont want to talk about what you are already reading in the newspapers or watching on the TV. Why is it that we have this fad for creating smaller tastes....errr...states. Not much difference between the two words you see. A state is a matter of taste. You like it, you stay with it. You dont like it, you ask for a better one. But the problem is, you might not get a better one than the one you have right now. So you need to make do with what you have. This is exactly what people have to understand. Alas! you can't educate a mob . You can't placate them with logic. What can we do then? Yield to their tastes? Create new states?

This is what we can do: Educate children. Poor guys, all over Andhra Pradesh, dont know why they get a holiday. They dont know why states are being divided, they dont know why public property is being torched, they dont know why they cant go out of their homes, they dont know why their freedom has been curtailed. It is these people who need to know the most about these issues for the simple reason that they are the ones who are going to face the consequences of the actions that will be taken in the next few years. Schools need to take up the responsibility of making children know as to why states are created, under what conditions can a state be divided and what are the advantages or disadvantages vis-a-vis creating a state. It is no more enough if children just know the number of states and the capital of each state. I would rather say that it is not at all essential to know what the capital of a state is, when you dont know why the state is there in the first place. They need to be told how a few independent MLA's could impact the result of a election if the state is small. They need to be told how creating new states without proper reasons will end up pumping more money into the hands a of a greedy few and how the situtation of the people will still remain the same if not worsen. They need to be told that a state can be divided,, only if it is a governance problem, but not when it is a problem realted to the lack of implementation of government policies.

As the educated elite, we have tied up ourselves so miserably that we can only sign online petitions to change things. I am not sure if anybody is bothered at all to pay attention to the petition.We dont vote or we dont want to vote. We stay in places which are away from our voting homes. Neither do we get holidays to go to our hometown and vote nor has the government implemented any facility that will enable us to vote when we are out of station. We are in a situation where we can only watch things unfold on umpteen news channels and rant and rave about them in online forums. I hate myself for being able to write this but not being able to do anything about it. And when I dont do anything to change the situation, the whole purpose of all that I have written is defeated. ( I have done something though- signed an online petition...dont blame me...cant do more).

PS: Just heard Ramadoss is thinking about splitting TN. Luckily for Chetan Bhagat, all this wont have an impact on the title of his latest book : The 2 states. His problems were different.