Buzzword - 'Anna Hazare ', 'Lokpal', 'Corruption'Habitat - 'Streets' , 'Media- in India and outside' (All my social media is spammed with Hazare and posts about him even when I am not in India)
Who cares - apparently 'We the people of India' (Including me)
If you survive and breathe in the air that has any remote connection to India, you know what I am talking about. Its probably a crusade of the decade and is getting comparison to the movements the great Gandhi organized. I am still overwhelmed by the situation.
I don’t care about Anna Hazare. I have numerous reasons to do so but lets skip that. India being a land of 'heroes and zeroes' I understand his rise to stardom and how people saw him as a messiah who could bring about The Change. But I would request any inquisitive mind to read the following article.
http://in.news.yahoo.com/blogs/opinions/rorschach-effect-indian-politics-053923332.html
If you cared and went through that you might agree with what I say next or you could be cursing me under your breathe, calling me a fake or worse an Indian in US not really knowing what she is talking about. I hope I can change some of it by the time you finish reading this.
We - the people of India - undermine ourselves. We always look for a savior to help us resolve our daily life cribbing. We fight for causes we hardly understand and are hopeful after each temple/shrine visits. We stand united when our heroes are attacked and things just get too personal from thereon. We are extremists, we go from being dormant to rebellious.
A lot of people will tell you it's wrong. They would tell you we do the rat race and follow the crowd. People will convince you with strong evidence and exemplify how we are a bunch of stupid fellas who do not know what we want from ourselves, our lives, our government. How we do not know the cause, the end and the reason. How we make a man our hero and will die saving his honor. How we are apathetic and hypocrites. How we swear to fight against corruption when we just did an under the table deal. How we are a bunch of hopefuls hypnotized by the words of wisdom and change by a man we hardly know about things we hardly will understand?
Well I beg to differ. Did all of them, and here I am quoting a friend, 'Understand the chemistry or history books that were shoved up their a**'. But we still did and an 'engineer' today is still an engineer though he might hate his job or know practically nothing about it. I am not supporting the ignorance people have about the whole situation but what I do not understand is the downright disapproval of the movement. Anna Hazare might not change the world and the Indian democracy but he is a stepping stone. People support him even though they do not know Lokpal because his stand symbolizes all they want to fight/change. As a friend said, 'The system is the disease and corruption is a symptom to it. With Lokpal we fight the symptom and not the disease'. Agreed. But if we could get rid of the disease in a blow, would the symptom have been ignored/discounted for so long. What we need is a start and I guess this moment is a ripened point. It gives the politically powerless middle class a medium to project their hopes, their idea of self-righteousness and the sense of a bringing about a change to the system they have nurtured, been forced upon and in some cases even benefited from.
Hazare is no Mahatma Gandhi. But he did bring people from all walks of life together for a cause.
Sure his method (of blackmail via the hunger fast) and his remedy (creating an alternative center of power and discretion instead of tackling the root causes of corruption) might be dubious but he did make India stop. He has the focus and determination not many of our leaders can claim. He might not be the most self righteous person but he has struck the right chord with the people. He made them ponder about things they chose to ignore, shook the belief that feeble middle-class vote won't make a difference and brought them together for a cause. And more importantly, he has their trust which sadly is not true for most of our leaders. When was the last time India saw such a build up?
So why the government ‘for the people’ and ‘by the people’ refusing to ‘listen to the people’?
I frankly do not know the answer. But what is important probably is people of India, after a while, think they know what they want. India is thinking. It has changed the notion of time in India to an extent where people are taking time to reflect on a diseased past that has haunted our country for a long time, a disease not only forced upon them but that became the very essence of their living and being. What Anna and Lokpal did was to take the everyday gossip about the system and the disease, make it into a conversation beyond ‘Yeh system hi kharab hai’. The conversation empowered the people towards a change, a revolution. And a revolution that a democracy had been waiting and needing for a while. The more enlightened mind could argue how wrong and stupid their fight is or help them understand and support their cause. This is beyond Lokpal and Hazare, its probably even beyond corruption for that matter. This for me signifies an awakening, a one long due.
