Lets start building a nation

Recently the visuals of Ram Sene vandalism flashed across the country. There was a huge media outcry then, but I can see that it is already fizzing out. Fewer and fewer discussions and protest happen around the incident and soon everyone will forget and get on with their lives. The only ones who will never forget are the victims themselves. But how much of a role should you expect from the media for similar incidents? They cannot take the complete responsibility to safeguard our societies from such criminal acts. Numerous incidents of atrocities happen as a daily affair in the rural India. Some get reported in the media but a lot goes unreported. After all the so called media operates mostly in urban areas, because even theirs is a money oriented business and they would try to cover only those things which would interest their urban audience.

If we just look around, we live in complete mess in our so called advanced societies of India. From the start of the day till the end, we go through utmost tyranny which we don’t deserve at all. I as a citizen after paying 30% of my earnings to the government do not deserve my city to be in such pathetic state. Your wake up time has to be adjusted because there are power cuts and water cuts. You have to start early because the roads are full of utter chaos. There is not even a decent public transportation system even after so many years in a city like Pune, leave alone other parts of the country. When I say decent, it means basic cleanliness, at least a place to stand when you are travelling, and minimum required frequency. Sometimes walking becomes a better option than buses.


On top of all this, political parties do whatever they want of their own will like the Mangalore pub incident and there is nobody to take action against them. A few grilling interviews by the media, some hoopla by the police and fanfare by the public, the case is closed. Have you ever imagined the sense of insecurity that such victims would be going through? In their own country, in their own land they have to live with fear day in and day out. Leave a lone a big political act, even slum dwellers do anything and get away with it because there is some party backing it. We might look down upon these people as uneducated and jobless but they are smarter than us. They know how to use these political outfits for their own benefits.


I am not writing this to put some sense into people who indulge is such vandalism or asking you to join politics and clean the country.I am just trying to remind you the greater power we have and to use it which is voting. You must have thought in the back of the mind that there is nothing new in this! It’s just like one of those ads in the TV encouraging to vote. I’ll still use the voting day as my day off or probably plan a vacation that day. Even if I vote it’s going to make no difference so why vote. But no! Imagine if the so called middle class starts voting. These political parties will turn to us and listen to our problems too. They are also in that business for their personal gains and they will listen to only those who give business to them. Once we show our power to these people, they will start doing things for our benefits. Again the reason would be the same which is political mileage. But the difference is that it would be for our benefits. It wont be very soon that everyone starts voting and it will take a while before all of us become aware. But to start with we can at least register our immediate family and get them to vote. We can try to speed up this process and keep trying in every election. It wont be far when every political party is fighting for to bring developments in a city to woo voters. Political outfits protesting and working hard for genuine issues, rather than rioting or hurting innocents. Then we would be able to bother about our own problems, rather than getting tensed about traffic or power cuts or even garbage cleaning.


PS: - Many of us don’t have voting cards and many more of us don’t even know the difference between an assembly election and a general election. There is a fantastic initiative by a few good Samaritans and their website is called www.jaagore.com. They have all the information relating to voting and they even track your voter ID card registration for you so that they don’t get lost in a government heap. You’ll be amazed at the amount of information they have and I am sure many of our myths about voting would also be cleared. There are only 25 days left to register for the voting registration as of 20/02/2009 so please register fast. Please go and vote this general election and let’s make our land a better place to live. Jai Hind!