Revolver-ution

This article was submitted for a competition at SIBM, Pune and as expected didn't win any award. I searched for the winning article, but didn't get the link. So, here it goes!!

I dream. I dream of a nation where the 73% of the rural population will have complete access to not just Facebook, Twitter and Youtube but also to food, clothing and shelter. If not for personal experience, the statement would have been just as bland as the rice water that these rural people consume for their only two meals of the day. I was on one of my biking trips in interior Orissa, burning the high-priced petrol for the sheer thrill of adventure, when I came across barrages of villages living without electricity. People were not ignorant anymore. Though the mobile revolution had reached them, there was no electricity. A basic question that arose was from where did they manage a source of electricity to charge these mobiles? They did, apparently, with car batteries! Sadly enough, they weren’t exposed to what the even Egyptian civilization was aware of – electricity. They survived with knowledge that a world of its own existed outside the periphery of their village and that, that world needs marijuana they produced - their only source of income. Blame the middlemen because ignorance is bliss – these people have no idea how much the green grass is sold for, to the sophisticated brown people, in the black market.

I dream. I dream of a day when I don’t need to fill up the caste/religion field on any application form. I want to be identified for the person that I am, than for where I come from. I want a reservation-free country where reservation is restricted to bus/train/airline/movie only. To make it happen in this country where it is easy to find a liquor shop, but difficult to find a school, the hypothesis will never hold true. With inter-caste/inter-religious marriages taking place at enormous rates like never before, we could envision a reservation-free country in the near future.

I dream. I dream of a free society – a society where education liberates the mind. A city is brimming with its engineers, yet questions about the quality of production always loom large. The terms educated and literate are confused, cramped and presented as one entity known as a responsible citizen. We have a lot of degree-giving colleges paying less heed to the subject of graduation. And only a handful of these colleges teach, inspire and make the students achieve in a profession that they choose to. With numbers demanding most importance, all the pseudo-educationalists want to reduce the demand-supply gap. But no one realises the underlying fact that a mere reduction is not what is needed. As the wake-up call has come late, the government is taking its time to react to the urge of educating its citizens better. The result: there has been a clamour of IITs and IIMs in the market. Without further dilution, things should get better once we focus on grass-root level primary education. The young generation of today has the responsibility of creating a better atmosphere for the next generation’s sustenance. The key to achieve this goal is through education. Although the educational reforms have been taking shape in modest speed only, it is, positively, the only hope that the country banks on for a better tomorrow.

I dream. I dream of a day when I don’t have to feel corrupt, as a citizen invading his own country. I am asked to pay a bribe to evade a ruthless punishment, for no mistake of mine. I am forced to be repressed in front of bureaucracy and accept that he is the master. My good candidate whom I vote for never wins. I am yelled at if I don’t break the traffic rules, I am rebuked, if I kiss my girl in public but those are the heroes who without a worry piss in public! I am caught in between two worlds – the world in which this is the country every businessman wants to make money in and the world in which this country is just a piece of land, with land being just a euphemism. When I invade my own country, why won’t the others? Taking cue from “Atlas Shrugged”, all the policy-makers think that there is no way to rule innocent people. The only power any government has is the power to take on the criminals. When there aren’t enough criminals, they make laws and policies to create new criminals. With our government “embracing” many a thing under Crime, it becomes impossible to live without breaking a few laws. And by breaking those laws, we become the newest members of the corrupt system. And that is how we invade our own country. We need policy changes – the root cause of all corrupt and not a bill to bring the corrupt to the court-of-law. Because once the corrupt are brought in to the court-of-law, they have their corrupt connections to be let out scot-free.

I dream. I dream of a day when I don’t have to feel the ire of regionalism in the country. A person from the South of the country is not treated as one’s next of kin in the North and vice-versa, while the East-West unity exists only as a global cultural phenomenon and not within the country. The phrase of Kashmir-to-Kanyakumari may no longer exist if enough attention is not given to the plight of the Kashmiris, the real sufferers in this tug of war. Arunachal Pradesh continues to remain a state of ambiguity to the rest of the country. We shouldn’t resent the fact that we cannot and did not do much about it, if and when the State slips out of our hands and becomes rightfully separate. The number of political parties outnumbers the stars on a clear night sky. And the major reason to it is the state and religion divide. Barring a few, every party follows the same ideology – Divide the countrymen and rule them. The architects of Indian Constitution might have borrowed key principles from the British, but what our politicians also inherited alongside the constitutional principles, is the “Divide and Rule” policy. Till date, our lack of unity alone has paved ways to numerous internal problems and external threats. Remember, our grandfathers fought for the country’s independence and won it because of their unity and the time has come for us to bring it back on display, even if it is as a payback for the mess that we ourselves have done to the country since then.

In the near future, I dream of a nation that will be free from the malaises and will be a united nation. Near future is all that we care for, based on which we forget the present. To whom have we left the responsibility of the present to be taken care of? To the ones who think that the present status will/should never change? If it has to change, they have to be changed and we will bring that change. This country has the largest number of youngster population in the world and young blood is boiling, listening to all the tantrums that they throw at us. I am one of them and I am that change. They hinder in my way of leading my life. They don’t give me what I deserve, but they take from me what they don’t deserve and what is rightfully mine. We caused a mini-revolution in the last six months. They have seen what happened in the Middle-East, what the youth is capable of and yet they turn a blind eye on us. We, the educated, the well-informed and well-connected youth are capable of changing the face of the nation – to bring about a Yuvalution to carry forward my life. Because, I care for this country and for its future.