Skip to main content

Slave's Distance

Image from World Future Fund


Technology is offering us more and more means of coming closer. There are chat sites, friendship sites, messaging apps; moreover, phone calls have become cheaper than ever. Has the distance between persons decreased, however? On the contrary, it seems to be increasing.

The reasons for this are complex like in any social problem. I would like to draw your attention to one aspect of that complexity: increasing totalitarianism in government. Through a lot of means like the Aadhar, the government has taken over a tentacle-like grip on citizens. Do you know that every single bank account of yours is open to government surveillance? The government can, if it wants, monitor your internet usage, your phone calls, and even your personal life if it comes to that.

On top of that intrusion into our personal affairs, the government is feeding us with a lot of lies and distortions. Already the textbooks in many North Indian states have been modified to teach a new history according to which the freedom fighters who were heroes hitherto have now become villains or insignificant while erstwhile villains are glorified.

Many leaders belonging to the ruling party, including the Prime Minister, keep uttering falsehood in their speeches. The latest example is that of Bhagat Singh mentioned by the PM in a speech.

TV channels and other news media are also employed by the government machinery to propagate a lot of falsehood.

There is a method in this insanity. The motive is to create a theocracy in which there will only be one religion, one culture, one language. Consequently many people get labelled as antinational and are under attacks of various kinds. In such a situation people begin to mistrust one another. You don’t know when your best friend will become your worst enemy just because of your religious or political affiliations.

The solution lies within each one of us. We need to rise above the falsehoods propagated by those in power. We need to challenge them in whatever capacity we can, however diminutive that capacity be. We need to uphold humanity as best as we can. There is no other way if we wish to forge ahead as a great nation of variegated people with umpteen cultures and languages.

PS. Written for IndiSpire Edition 221: #insecurity

A personal note: I have noticed that the tendency to treat people as slaves is spreading to certain educational institutions too. Recently the education board under which I work ordered teachers to report for examiner duties under threat of a massive fine of ₹50,000. The Regional Officer of that Board has been issuing more and more intimidating messages as well as orders in the last two months to teachers. I wondered again and again why teachers should be treated with so much indignity. I guess the totalitarian disease is contagious.


Top post on IndiBlogger, the biggest community of Indian Bloggers


Comments

  1. UnknownMay 13, 2018 at 8:38 AM

    Absolutely true

    ReplyDelete
  2. adityaMay 13, 2018 at 3:02 PM

    Nice sir ..

    ReplyDelete
  3. www.mohanmekap.comMay 13, 2018 at 7:16 PM

    nice article

    ReplyDelete
  4. Renu VyasMay 14, 2018 at 12:36 PM

    I agree with you on this !Not only do they intrude in our privacy, the communal hatred that they have promoted sometimes scares me..

    ReplyDelete
    Replies
    1. Tomichan MatheikalMay 14, 2018 at 6:14 PM

      That communal hatred is the real poison. All the rest can be seen as part of normal life. But this communal identity and hatred are gifts of the new dispensation and very dangerous to our continuance as a nation.

      Delete
  5. Pradeep NairMay 14, 2018 at 5:01 PM

    It is interesting how our faith and trust shifts. There was a time, in the time of our parents and grandparents, when they trusted the government with all information. They never trusted any private business or company.
    Today, it is just the opposite. We will rather trust all our personal information with a private enterprise rather than with the government.
    And the biggest irony is that, if anything goes wrong, people generally blame the government (whom they don't trust), and not the private guys (whom they seem to trust).
    Something to ponder over!

    ReplyDelete
    Replies
    1. Tomichan MatheikalMay 14, 2018 at 6:16 PM

      Yes, it's something to ponder over, no doubt. But do people really trust anyone nowadays? I think people are waking up to the nastiness of the whole thing after people looted the country and left the nation with the loot. Today people know that certain private players are in cahoots with the government in swindling us lock, stock and barrel.

      Delete
  6. Jyotirmoy SarkarMay 15, 2018 at 9:02 AM

    Bold and strong writing.

    ReplyDelete
  7. Nima DasMay 16, 2018 at 11:36 AM

    I like the way you veered the original topic given in the 'Inspire' to suit the subject you have written about. I fully agree with you that the present government is so insecure that it doesn't allow dissent and when dissent isn't allowed can we call it a democracy? Insecurity stems from the lack of confidence in oneself. When the government has spoken so many lies in the past can it be a confident/secure government?

    ReplyDelete
  8. Tomichan MatheikalMay 16, 2018 at 3:15 PM

    The government continues to propagate falsehood. However, the reluctance of the PM to give interviews is a sign of insecurity indeed.

    ReplyDelete

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
47 comments
Read more

Relatives and Antidepressants

One of the scenes that remain indelibly etched in my memory is from a novel of Malayalam writer O V Vijayan. Father and little son are on a walk. Father tells son, “Walk carefully, son, otherwise you may fall down.” Son: “What will happen if I fall?” Father: "Relatives will laugh.” I seldom feel comfortable with my relatives. In fact, I don’t feel comfortable in any society, but relatives make it more uneasy. The reason, as I’ve understood, is that your relatives are the last people to see any goodness in you. On the other hand, they are the first ones to discover all your faults. Whenever certain relatives visit, my knees buckle and the blood pressure shoots up. I behave quite awkwardly. They often describe my behaviour as arising from my ego, which used to be a oversized in yesteryear. I had a few such visitors the other day. The problem was particularly compounded by their informing me that they would be arriving by about 3.30 pm and actually reaching at about 7.30 pm. ...
16 comments
Read more

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...
19 comments
Read more

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...
16 comments
Read more

Mother Mary Comes to Me

Book Review In one of the first pages of this book, the author cautions us to “read this book as you would a novel.” No one can remember the events of their lives accurately. Roy says that “most of us are a living, breathing soup of memory and imagination … and we may not be the best arbiters of which is which.” What you remember may not be what happened exactly. As we get on with the painful process called life, we keep rewriting our own narratives. The book does read like a novel. Not because Roy has fictionalised her and her mother’s lives. The characters of these two women are extremely complex, that’s why. Then there is Roy’s style which transmutes everything including anger and despair into lyrical poetry. There’s a lot of pain and sadness in this book. The way Roy narrates all that makes it quite a classic in the genre of memoirs. The book is not so much about Roy’s mother Mary as about that mother’s impact on the daughter’s very being. Arundhati was born in the undivided ...
14 comments
Read more