It has been 65 years since we have fought our freedom back. At least it is written so in black and white. But was this what our great grand fathers and great freedom fighters fought for and sacrificed their life for? Surely not. How could they? When our great freedom fighters were undergoing the unendurable sufferings and third degree tortures, did they ever dream of an India anything alike what it is now? Yet we are the leading emerging economy in the world scenario, a flashy made up face plastered with our self proclaimed “India Shining” slogan. If you dare to go deeper and look beyond the glossy make up, you will find the malignant daunting scars of child sexual abuse, girl foeticide, Dowry, Honor Killing, Domestic Violence, Alcohol abuse underneath. In our Shining India, we make sure that the fetus inside the woman’s womb in not a girl. Doctors, nurses, nursing homes all are our aide. But even after all these honest efforts sometimes some disobedient woman keeps her baby in and we are burdened with one more girl child in our society. We all know how meticulous we are in torturing females and we are never in short of our excuses. So we will try our hands on molesting the small girl inside and outside our houses. We will make their lives miserable. They will find it hard to walk alone in the city. We will rape them. Some find their solace in death. Teenage suicide is growing like a wild fire in India. Some girls are so stubborn that they still keep growing against our wishes. No matter how much we try to put a fence around them they somehow manage to find a way out. They dare to fall in love and we get our new excuse to kill them simply to save our honor and tradition. But not all girls are that daring to set their foot out of the boundaries drawn by the society. For them we ask a huge unrealistic amount of dowry to get another reason to kill them. And no matter the amount is paid or not we torture them, beat them, and bruise them anyway in the name of taming our wives.
We discuss in forums, we act in street plays, we walk in various marches, shouting the coveted “save girl child” slogan, but the moment we come back home we expect our wives to be prepared with the proper food, served at proper temperature! A small fluctuation from that makes us very angry. “What do you do whole day sitting at home, when you can’t even get the food properly ready and served?” The same “us” ask for abortion, when scanned pregnant with a girl child. Given a chance the same uncles, brothers, cousins, who are fighting for so called woman rights, try to touch the girl at their home “inappropriately”. The same us who are so called highly educated well settled men, ask for dowry with a sheepish grin on face, and do not go back to torture the wife in case the demand is not met. And even if the demand is met, we simply raise our demand further. As if we get some sort of birth right on the father in law’s hard earned money and life’s saving, just by marrying his daughter!
Even though it is written in our constitution that a girl of 18 years of age have the full constitutional right to choose her life partner on her own. The same is applicable for a boy of 21 years as well. But when it comes to the most important decision of our life, we are not the one to decide. The village panchayat and/or the parents take the decision for the couple. If not done as per their wish they decide rather to kill the couple, than to let them live their life happily.
Do you think we do not know our problems? Do you think our society is unaware of all these? We all know what our vices are. Damn pretty well we know. But yet at the same time we keep on doing the same bad things as if being under the spell of some dark power.
So we are actually beyond the situation of any good advices or message to be delivered or heard. Simply showing the naked truth of the dark stinky society will no more do any good. Rather we have become so barbaric, that we in fact get a source of amusement and thrill from all such kind of programs on societal wrong doings, aired in the TV or radio.
All the problems I discussed in the previous page are not simple problems. These problems are deep rooted, the disease is old and almost settled in the body of Indian society. So trying to find out easy ready-made solutions for those issues will be a childish dream. Airing some TV/ radio programs, each episode for one issue, with some touchy tunes and a teary eyed host with emotionally modulated voice is not going to do much good.
It is not that we don’t know the problem. We all know the problem since long back. What the real problem is that we don’t know ourselves quite well. We don’t want the solution actually. We are quite adjusted and compromised with the existing norms. What we want is to shed some tears while listening to other people’s story who are suffering the same fate as us. Even a molested girl, while listening to the programs does not feel much enthusiastic about fighting for the justice. Instead she will go further inside the shell after repeatedly seeing and hearing the incidents of other molested girls.
We are continuously struggling to survive throughout our life. There are ample pains and sufferings in our lives already. So simply hammering our mind every damn day with some more painful stories of some other people, are not going to do any good to us. After a day full of stressful work and hectic commuting, we all want anything but some more dose of tears and sobbing emotion. People will watch these for some time, to make themselves feel comfy about, that they are not the only one who is suffering. Some sort of sadistic sympathy acts there. But after a few dose of sob and sympathy, even they become frustrated. Because sobbing on TV is not going to change anything at all. The real people, real pain and real cry couldn’t change the concepts and norms of society, and these program makers think that one liner request from one celebrity will make the parliament pass bills like shopping lists!
If uprooting these social problems was so easy, don’t you think we would have done the same long time back? You not only need to change your thinking, but also change your action. No matter how much you shed crocodile tears, if you do not change your real life action, then nothing’s going to change a dime. So changing the action of a person could not be done by making him shed tears for 45 minutes a day or week by showing him some program. Leave alone the mass change of action meant for the mass.
When we watch a TV program our mind and brain gets divided. We watch our program keeping our brain at sleeping mode. We watch TV to relax a bit and so we depend only on our mind while watching and judging any program and its content. That is where Satyamev Jayate is having big time trouble.
