The land’s newspapers of all hues may well have overfilled the space in their columns reporting happenings leaving the people at large, particularly the elderly sections in society, aghast. A leisurely walk amidst their regular gatherings in the evenings at chosen locations such as parks and various untenanted public places including paved frontages of shops with their shutters downed, a common sight in Mysuru, enables one to know first hand as they throw up their disenchantment about the many and growing number of ills bugging the society nowadays. The depth of their troubled sense of seeking the underlying factors at the root of the society’s declining makeover of character doesn’t seem to raise any hope of witnessing again the past golden days of several decades ago they recollect. They also may be feeling helpless by not being in a position to contribute their mite in any manner to put the contemporary society on track.

The silence in public domain about the open invitation as it were to the ills visiting the land’s masses is deafening to the extent of wondering “Why this indifference towards the urgent and important task of arresting the decline in public life?” One doesn’t have to take the trouble of pointing the accusing finger towards any individual at the helm, given the simple fact of the missing sense of discipline, dedication, determination and duty-consciousness among the diaspora, barring exceptions.

Various agencies are engaged in global studies gathering data and information portraying the profile of countries across the world, including India, confining mostly to economic parameters such as per capita income, productivity in agriculture and industry, unemployment, disease burden and so on, apart from well-chosen social parameters such as poverty, illiteracy and others. May be for reasons not far to seek, those agencies have stayed away from pin-pointing the otherwise all-too-clear, virtually full-time pre-occupation of the land’s masses in self-inflicting the many ills bugging them. Those ills don’t need to be mentioned explicitly, but two of them cannot but be stated here. One is vandalising the resources that are vital to life (water, soil, greenery). The other is living in insanitary environs (Mumbai is reportedly hosting a headcount that is five times the population of Mysuru city in slums — 6.5 million).

Poverty doesn’t fit into the list of invited ills of the masses, subject to the factor of laziness on the part of even able-bodied youth in the land. The nation’s current flock of society’s leaders, with their lowly public image, once again barring exceptions, are sparing no efforts in widening the net of invited ills among the masses.