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

Florentino’s Many Loves

Florentino Ariza has had 622 serious relationships (combo pack with sex) apart from numerous fleeting liaisons before he is able to embrace the only woman whom he loved with all his heart and soul. And that embrace happens “after a long and troubled love affair” that lasted 51 years, 9 months, and 4 days. Florentino is in his late 70s when he is able to behold, and hold as well, the very body of his beloved Fermina, who is just a few years younger than him. She now stands before him with her wrinkled shoulders, sagged breasts, and flabby skin that is as pale and cold as a frog’s. It is the culmination of a long, very long, wait as far as Florentino is concerned, the end of his passionate quest for his holy grail. “I’ve remained a virgin for you,” he says. All those 622 and more women whose details filled the 25 diaries that he kept writing with meticulous devotion have now vanished into thin air. They mean nothing now that he has reached where he longed to reach all his life. The
62 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

Unromantic Men

Romance is a tenderness of the heart. That is disappearing even from the movies. Tenderness of heart is not a virtue anymore; it is a weakness. Who is an ideal man in today’s world? Shakespeare’s Romeo and Sarat Chandra Chattopadhyay’s Devdas would be considered as fools in today’s world in which the wealthiest individuals appear on elite lists, ‘strong’ leaders are hailed as nationalist heroes, and success is equated with anything other than traditional virtues. The protagonist of Colleen McCullough’s 1977 novel, The Thorn Birds [which sold more than 33 million copies], is torn between his idealism and his natural weaknesses as a human being. Ralph de Bricassart is a young Catholic priest who is sent on a kind of punishment-appointment to a remote rural area of Australia where the Cleary family arrives from New Zealand in 1921 to take care of the enormous estate of Mary Carson who is Paddy Cleary’s own sister. Meggy Cleary is the only daughter of Paddy and Fiona who have eight so
39 comments
Read more

Octlantis

I was reading an essay on octopuses when friend John walked in. When he is bored of his usual activities – babysitting and gardening – he would come over. Politics was the favourite concern of our conversations. We discussed politics so earnestly that any observer might think that we were running the world through the politicians quite like the gods running it through their devotees. “Octopuses are quite queer creatures,” I said. The essay I was reading had got all my attention. Moreover, I was getting bored of politics which is irredeemable anyway. “They have too many brains and a lot of hearts.” “That’s queer indeed,” John agreed. “Each arm has a mind of its own. Two-thirds of an octopus’s neurons are found in their arms. The arms can taste, touch, feel and act on their own without any input from the brain.” “They are quite like our politicians,” John observed. Everything is linked to politics in John’s mind. I was impressed with his analogy, however. “Perhaps, you’re r
34 comments
Read more

Yesterday

With students of Carmel Margaret, are you grieving / Over Goldengrove unleaving…? It was one of my first days in the eleventh class of Carmel Public School in Kerala, the last school of my teaching career. One girl, whose name was not Margaret, was in the class looking extremely melancholy. I had noticed her for a few days. I didn’t know how to put the matter over to her. I had already told the students that a smiling face was a rule in the English class. Since Margaret didn’t comply, I chose to drag Hopkins in. I replaced the name of Margaret with the girl’s actual name, however, when I quoted the lines. Margaret is a little girl in the Hopkins poem. Looking at autumn’s falling leaves, Margaret is saddened by the fact of life’s inevitable degeneration. The leaves have to turn yellow and eventually fall. And decay. The poet tells her that she has no choice but accept certain inevitabilities of life. Sorrow is our legacy, Margaret , I said to Margaret’s alter ego in my class. Let
36 comments
Read more