Society’s selfie

Even as the citizens are seen in public deviating from acceptable norms of conducting themselves towards others, creating sour atmosphere in society, the administration has no option other than passing orders in the nature of Acts, Rules, Regulations and even Ordinances ostensibly to restore order in the land. The sequence of such episodes of citizens going adrift from orderly life on one side and the authorities passing orders, along with penalties and punishments for disobeying the diktats, is in the nature of the proverbial endless screw. Thanks to the unbounded misdemeanour of the people at large, while the law implementing machinery finds itself overwhelmed, the legal practitioners defending the offending flock are having a field-day, with the law-abiding sections watching the proceedings helplessly. Earthquakes are measured by seismologists using the term magnitude as their chosen parameter to indicate the severity of the event. In a similar vein, it is time somebody came out with a measure to describe the magnitude of societal-quake that the country is currently experiencing.

Reading the country’s history spanning several centuries in three distinct parts, (a) Rule by monarchs, (b) Rule of the invaders, (c) Rule by colonialists, one cannot but get bewildered at how the country’s people have sustained not only themselves but also their traditions, customs, callings, languages, food habits and so on for the most part. The fourth part of the country’s history, namely self-rule over the past-seven plus decades, may trigger more dismay than bewilderment, given the current profile of land and its populace.

The land and its people of bygone centuries have witnessed both benign rule by monarchs and wars fought by locals as well as aliens even as philosophers and saints mentored the society by personal example and words of wisdom. To make a long story short, the country, following the dawn of political freedom, has slipped into an era of vice-like grip of political class whose selfie has totally erased the country’s image of past glory. If we currently hear in some quarters views extolling the country as a land of glorious heritage, that is the shining side of the same coin with the other whining side. Both physical and mental wellness of the country’s people at large, as prescribed by its luminaries of distant past, have suffered at the hands of influential elements in society seeing the words of wisdom through the prism of religion.

The fever of clicking selfies having gripped the merry-making youth at the land’s tourist destinations has not spared even the top brass in the country’s administration. What these ubiquitous selfies don’t reveal is the utter disregard to the now-gone sense of Indianness yielding place to a culture of blindly imitating Western ways of life.