Skip to main content

My India in 2016


“Every Indian has a right over everything that India has.  From this, he or she is free to weave his or her dreams.  The India of tomorrow will have 125 crore such dreams, and will be built on the same.  We will not only empower our citizens with the ability to dream, we will enable them with the capacity to actualise their dreams.”

The passage is quoted verbatim from the 2014 Election Manifesto of the Bharatiya Janata Party which went on to win the elections.  A year and a half is not a period long enough for materialising such a grand vision.  But it is a period long enough to move in the direction, at least a few steps. 

Modi at Sivagiri math in Kerala recently
Instead of empowering the dreams of the citizens, they are being driven deeper and deeper into a quagmire of rising prices of food and communal dis-ease, in addition to all the old problems of corruption in politics, unemployment, widening gap between the rich and the poor, and so on.  Worse, certain concepts like secularism and tolerance have been villainised into bad words.

As Pratap Bhanu Mehta writes in today’s Indian Express, BJP’s “hubris and doublespeak” along with the garb of “victimhood” which it refuses to shed even after winning a landslide majority in the elections jettisons any possibility of letting the people dream, let alone materialising the party’s own promised dreams.

I still dare to dream.  What is life without dreams anyway?

My dream is not for a utopian India.  Mine is a simple dream.  Let me borrow Mr Mehta’s words once more.  I look forward to an India where “the balance of hope and fear, trust and distrust, possibility and constraint, progress and inertia tends in the positive direction.” 

In plain words, it is a simple dream which looks forward to an India where, if the great dreams of empowering the citizens cannot be materialised, we can at least have an atmosphere that does not stifle mutual trust among the people.  If nothing can be done to prevent corruption, to bring back the black money from the foreign banks as promised, or to bring development to every citizen, at least let there be a healthy atmosphere of trust and hope, cooperation and forward movement.  Let India remain as a single nation of diverse people living together in harmony.

That is not an impossible dream provided the party can shed its “hubris and doublespeak.”  
Indian Bloggers


Labels:

Comments

  1. parwatisingariJanuary 2, 2016 at 5:23 AM

    You Said it.. I feel betrayed when I do not see the step towards the promised Utopia.

    ReplyDelete
    Replies
    1. Tomichan MatheikalJanuary 2, 2016 at 6:54 AM

      Many people feel helpless and betrayed. Let's hope the New Year will mark a change.

      Delete
  2. Nisha JhaJanuary 2, 2016 at 9:46 AM

    You penned it well.

    ReplyDelete
  3. Brendan DabhiJanuary 2, 2016 at 9:59 AM

    Waiting for 'Achhe din' indeed!

    ReplyDelete
  4. RakeshJanuary 3, 2016 at 9:54 PM

    Well! What else do you expect of a political manifesto? :D

    ReplyDelete
    Replies
    1. Tomichan MatheikalJanuary 3, 2016 at 9:58 PM

      True. Words are condemned to be hollow in politics.

      Delete

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

The Ghost of a Banyan Tree

  Image from here Fiction Jaichander Varma could not sleep. It was past midnight and the world outside Jaichander Varma’s room was fairly quiet because he lived sufficiently far away from the city. Though that entailed a tedious journey to his work and back, Mr Varma was happy with his residence because it afforded him the luxury of peaceful and pure air. The city is good, no doubt. Especially after Mr Modi became the Prime Minister, the city was the best place with so much vikas. ‘Where’s vikas?’ Someone asked Mr Varma once. Mr Varma was offended. ‘You’re a bloody antinational mussalman who should be living in Pakistan ya kabristan,’ Mr Varma told him bluntly. Mr Varma was a proud Indian which means he was a Hindu Brahmin. He believed that all others – that is, non-Brahmins – should go to their respective countries of belonging. All Muslims should go to Pakistan and Christians to Rome (or is it Italy? Whatever. Get out of Bharat Mata, that’s all.) The lower caste Hindus co...
121 comments
Read more

The Adventures of Toto as a comic strip

  'The Adventures of Toto' is an amusing story by Ruskin Bond. It is prescribed as a lesson in CBSE's English course for class 9. Maggie asked her students to do a project on some of the lessons and Femi George's work is what I would like to present here. Femi converted the story into a beautiful comic strip. Her work will speak for itself and let me present it below.  Femi George Student of Carmel Public School, Vazhakulam, Kerala Similar post: The Little Girl
44 comments
Read more

Romance in Utopia

Book Review Title: My Haven Author: Ruchi Chandra Verma Pages: 161 T his little novel is a surfeit of sugar and honey. All the characters that matter are young employees of an IT firm in Bengaluru. One of them, Pihu, 23 years and all too sweet and soft, falls in love with her senior colleague, Aditya. The love is sweetly reciprocated too. The colleagues are all happy, furthermore. No jealousy, no rivalry, nothing that disturbs the utopian equilibrium that the author has created in the novel. What would love be like in a utopia? First of all, there would be no fear or insecurity. No fear of betrayal, jealousy, heartbreak… Emotional security is an essential part of any utopia. There would be complete trust between partners, without the need for games or power struggles. Every relationship would be built on deep understanding, where partners complement each other perfectly. Miscommunication and misunderstanding would be rare or non-existent, as people would have heightened emo...
9 comments
Read more

Tanishq and the Patriots

Patriots are a queer lot. You don’t know what all things can make them pick up the gun. Only one thing is certain apparently: the gun for anything. When the neighbouring country behaves like a hoard of bandicoots digging into our national borders, we will naturally take up the gun. But nowadays we choose to redraw certain lines on the map and then proclaim that not an inch of land has been lost. On the other hand, when a jewellery company brings out an ad promoting harmony between the majority and the minority populations, our patriots take up the gun. And shoot down the ad. Those who promote communal harmony are traitors in India today. The sacred duty of the genuine Indian patriot is to hate certain communities, rape their women, plunder their land, deny them education and other fundamental rights and basic requirements. Tanishq withdrew the ad that sought to promote communal harmony. The patriot’s gun won. Aapka Bharat Mahan. In the novel Black Hole which I’m writing there is...
61 comments
Read more

A Lesson from Little Prince

I joined the #WriteAPageADay challenge of Blogchatter , as I mentioned earlier in another post. I haven’t succeeded in writing a page every day, though. But as long as you manage to write a minimum of 10,000 words in the month of Feb, Blogchatter is contented. I woke up this morning feeling rather vacant in the head, which happens sometimes. Whenever that happens to me but I do want to get on with what I should, I fall back on a book that has inspired me. One such book is Antoine de Saint-Exupery’s The Little Prince . I have wished time and again to meet Little Prince in person as the narrator of his story did. We might have interesting conversations like the ones that exist in the novel. If a sheep eats shrubs, will he also eat flowers? That is one of the questions raised by Little Prince [LP]. “A sheep eats whatever he meets,” the narrator answers. “Even flowers that have thorns?” LP is interested in the rose he has on his tiny planet. When he is told that the sheep will eat f...
8 comments
Read more