Skip to main content

Bury the dead

Image from shubhzquotes


India is like a vehicle whose driver is always looking into the rear-view mirror. Our leaders and too many citizens are stuck in the past. They are always busy digging up gems from the past. It is nice to belong to a civilisation that has a great history. But to be buried in that history is quite insane.
Either we are stuck with the glories of the past or we are picking the errors from the same place. Glories belong to the ancient past and the errors belong to rather recent past: that’s the only difference. The recent past stretches from Nehru and his ‘dynasty’ to the Mughals. While the ancient India knew everything from nuclear physics to the Internet, Nehru and his dynasty were an ignorant and vicious lot that ruined the great civilisation of the past. The degeneration began with the Mughals, of course.
Whether the Mughals and his successors committed all the historical blunders is immaterial if progress is what we want. It’s no use looking back and grumbling about the ditches and potholes on the roads that we have already traversed. We should deal with the present if we wish to forge a great future. The present is all that we have right now. We can act only in the present. And action is what is required; not grumbling or nitpicking.
The past is dead; bury it. The future is yet to be; shape it. The present regime has wasted six years obsessed with the past. As a result India has become one of the worst nations in the world today. More poverty, more unemployment, more corruption, more violence, more hatred, an endless list of evils is what we now have because of our absurd obsession with the past. Too many of us are busy trying to correct the mistakes of the past. That’s a totally useless activity.
Liberate yourself from the past. Live here and now. Deal with the problems of today. There is no other way if you wish to create a bright future.

Comments

  1. Right you are Sir. If not for the (selfish and manipulative) politicians, this lesson is meant for the commoners all over the nation. Let's learn it and keep ourselves reminding everyday so that we do not fall into the trap of the dirty (and complex) politics being relentlessly played with us by the shrewd ones.

    ReplyDelete
    Replies
    1. Thank you, Jitender, for the endorsement. If only all of us realised the importance of the here and now, India would be such a nice place.

      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...

The Vegetarian

Book Review Title: The Vegetarian Author: Han Kang Translator: Deborah Smith [from Korean] Publisher: Granta, London, 2018 Pages: 183 Insanity can provide infinite opportunities to a novelist. The protagonist of Nobel laureate Han Kang’s Booker-winner novel, The Vegetarian , thinks of herself as a tree. One can argue with ample logic and conviction that trees are far better than humans. “Trees are like brothers and sisters,” Yeong-hye, the protagonist, says. She identifies herself with the trees and turns vegetarian one day. Worse, she gives up all food eventually. Of course, she ends up in a mental hospital. The Vegetarian tells Yeong-hye’s tragic story on the surface. Below that surface, it raises too many questions that leave us pondering deeply. What does it mean to be human? Must humanity always entail violence? Is madness a form of truth, a more profound truth than sanity’s wisdom? In the disturbing world of this novel, trees represent peace, stillness, and nonviol...

The RSS does not exist

An organisation that has 80,000 branches in India does not exist legally in any document. This is the cover story of The Caravan this month. By the way, The Caravan is one of the very few publications that still continues to exist in spite of being overtly critical of Narendra Modi and his Sangh Parivar. The Rashtriya Swayamsevak Sangh (RSS) is not registered as an organisation under any of the usual Indian registration laws such as the Societies Registration Act or as a trust or company. It functions as an unregistered voluntary organisation, though it is arguably the largest public organisation in the country. This situation makes the organisation absolutely unaccountable to anyone, argues The Caravan . The RSS is not legally required to file annual returns to the Tax department or disclose its financial details publicly though it deals with thousands of crores of rupees every year especially after Modi became the Prime Minister of the country. The membership of the organisat...

No Problems Only Opportunities

You’ve probably heard this joke. A young man walked into his office one morning and found a beautiful young lady sitting in his chair. He called the MD and said, “Sir, I have a problem.” The MD replied, “Don’t you know our company’s motto, young man? No Problems, Only Opportunities .” When Suchita of The Blogchatter sent me a mail with the topic of this week’s blog hop –  - the first thing that came to my mind was the above joke. I know many people – too many, in fact – who went through terrible problems. My own life was a series of problems in none of which was there the consolation of any beautiful woman. One essential lesson I learnt from life is that life is a series of problems. You solve one and then arises the next one. Now I have reached an age when problems are no more problems: they are life itself. If you ask me what was the biggest problem I ever dealt with, it was my last years in Shillong. I was a lecturer in a college drawing a fat salary stipulated by the U...