Skip to main content

Where has trust gone?

I will be discharged soon from the hospital where I remained confined to my bed for the last ten days with a fractured foot.  One of the precious lessons I learnt during these helpless days is that too many people are losing trust in systems including medical services.

Hospitals carry out unnecessary tests and even surgeries merely for profit. This was the opinion of the vast majority of my visitors. Most foods are adulterated. Education is sheer business today. Most people seemed to have little trust in any system.

The present wave of patriotism that is sweeping the country also came in for much ridicule. The decision about demonetisation was leaked to people who matter. The foulest souls are preaching the noblest ideals like patriotism and need for self-sacrifice for the sake of the nation. Comparisons are drawn between the suffering citizen and the warring soldier. I imagined my wife as a Rani of Jhansi as she shuttled among her workplace, home, my hospital and merciless ATMs. The TV showed me a retired soldier being slapped by a constable maintaining discipline before an ATM. My country folk stood with reverence as the high decibels of the cinema halls blared the national anthem before the movie began. Patriotism surged in my veins.

But in the privacy of the hospital room people came and went cursing the nation and is varied hells.

One young friend said, "Even religion is business today.". He knew about certain religious people who whitened their invalid currency with the help of some of their staff and others.  Then he was in a hurry to leave.  Because the evening ritual in a particular religious place was about to begin and he had to attend it.

I lay in my bed looking at the bandage around my foot. Only my foot is broken, i consoled myself. 

Comments

  1. Wish you a speedy complete recovery. Health care, religion ... you name it.. everything is a business...

    ReplyDelete
    Replies
    1. Thanks, Durga sir.

      Regarding the commercialism, I believe people are going to rebel soon against certain systems at least. Or maybe there will just be winners and losers.

      Delete
  2. I strongly believe that we,humans are pretty good in raising fingers. We very easily keep blaming rather then taking any action. Get well soon.

    ReplyDelete
    Replies
    1. It's easier to blame than take action. But it's also true that india is changing in undesirable ways.

      Thanks for the wishes.

      Delete

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

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

The Little Girl

The Little Girl is a short story by Katherine Mansfield given in the class 9 English course of NCERT. Maggie gave an assignment to her students based on the story and one of her students, Athena Baby Sabu, presented a brilliant job. She converted the story into a delightful comic strip. Mansfield tells the story of Kezia who is the eponymous little girl. Kezia is scared of her father who wields a lot of control on the entire family. She is punished severely for an unwitting mistake which makes her even more scared of her father. Her grandmother is fond of her and is her emotional succour. The grandmother is away from home one day with Kezia's mother who is hospitalised. Kezia gets her usual nightmare and is terrified. There is no one at home to console her except her father from whom she does not expect any consolation. But the father rises to the occasion and lets the little girl sleep beside him that night. She rests her head on her father's chest and can feel his heart...

Modi’s Art of Censorship

One of the infinite ironies about Narendra Modi’s India is its flagrant censorship while claiming to be the most tolerant civilisation. A Guardian report today informs us that Arundhati Roy’s 2020 book, Azadi , is banned in Kashmir for promoting a “false narrative and secessionism.” Being a fan of Ms Roy’s rebellious spirit, I buy her books as they are published. I had reviewed this book ( Azadi ) back in 2020 when it was published. The Congress government that ruled India for a very long period, before Modi’s rhetoric mesmerised the Indian electorate, was highly flawed. Corruption ran in its every single vein. Yet it was far better than what Modi brought in its place. The glaring hypocrisy of the Congress was a glue that held India together, Ms Roy says in this censored book of hers. What she means to say is that though secularism was not practised sincerely or consistently the pretence of it acted as a binding force that maintained a kind of social and political equilibrium. T...

The Real Enemies of India

People in general are inclined to pass the blame on to others whatever the fault.  For example, we Indians love to blame the British for their alleged ‘divide-and-rule’ policy.  Did the British really divide India into Hindus and Muslims or did the Indians do it themselves?  Was there any unified entity called India in the first place before the British unified it? Having raised those questions, I’m going to commit a further sacrilege of quoting a British journalist-cum-historian.  In his magnum opus, India: a History , John Keay says that the “stock accusations of a wider Machiavellian intent to ‘divide and rule’ and to ‘stir up Hindu-Muslim animosity’” levelled against the British Raj made little sense when the freedom struggle was going on in India because there really was no unified India until the British unified it politically.  Communal divisions existed in India despite the political unification.  In fact, they existed even before the Briti...

Solzhenitsyn’s Many Disillusionments

Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn died a sad and disillusioned man. Solzhenitsyn was a genuine socialist in the beginning. He fought for the Red Army in WWII. He was a committed Soviet patriot. Equality, justice, and dignity of the workers were his ideals, his dreams. However, Stalin became a brutal dictator and Solzhenitsyn became his vocal critic. As a result, Solzhenitsyn was arrested and sent to the Gulag: a network of inhuman labour camps. Hundreds of Russians were tortured and killed in those camps and Solzhenitsyn was disillusioned with socialism. The Russian Revolution was supposed to have liberated the common citizens from imperial oppressions. However, the new government under Stalin was far more ruthless, unjust, and oppressive than the empire. The socialist ideology became a kind of deity for which everything else was sacrificed, including truth. Writing the story of his life in the camp in The Gulag Archipelago , Solzhenitsyn warned that such systems coul...