INDIA 2030 – A Scary Outlook Forms

It’s been about 5 years since I wrote a piece. Which, in a way is a good thing. Nothing poked enough, enough that I had to get up and write. Today, that changed. I feel anguish, pain, and a general sense of hopelessness.

In 2015, as a gullible sophomore, I wrote an essay trying to form a general sense of what the country would be like in 2020. It exuded confidence in our future as a nation, it put faith in the people, it imagined a powerful country built by, and for the people. An Industrious, hard-working and honest population. Governed by fallible but somewhat sincere and honest representatives.

2020 did turn out to be somewhat along those lines, the idea of India as a global power was gathering steam, entrepreneurship was on the rise, middle class incomes were improving, health awareness was increasing, and there was a general sense of positivity amongst the populace.

Today that positivity is puff. A series of incidents over the past year have proven, that the political class of today is equally, if not more, corrupt, deceitful, immoral, and insensitive than the ones from our past. We are still that country where Nambi Narayanan was ostracised. We are still that country where Nirbhaya was raped and murdered. We are still that country where Aditya Sachdeva was shot dead for overtaking a politician’s car, and the accused acquitted.

Our justice system is broken and serves the whims of politicians. The government today is all smoke and mirrors. There is no honesty and zero accountability, just a lot of heart-thumping and Rah-Rah. Every question is answered with anecdotes, allegations, and past references. The parliament is supposed to procedurally run this country, in the present, not reference and catalog the past. The failure of one does not justify the failure of another. Amongst all this loud-mouthing, blame-shifting, and baselining, it’s the common man who is left holding the mixed pot of truth, lies and outright deceit.

Every tyrant did it in the name of the broader good, and the public accepted. They know well that they need the support of the masses, so every misdeed is justified by referencing the larger good, the past, or a bunch of pseudo-reforms for the future, anything that makes the wrongdoing procedural rather than personal. We would do well to remember that it is personal. Imagine being in the place of that honest, hard-working girl, being raped and beaten, knowing that her perpetrators would continue living respected lives. Imagine being in the place of Aditya, shot, fighting for your life, knowing that the shooter would scoot free. Imagine being Nambi, giving up on every comfort for your nation, and a bunch of good-for-nothing policemen frame you as a traitor. Imagine that anguish, and the smoke mirrors start to break. We are a failed people, to everyone who gave their honest work for this nation, and got death and injustice in return. A few stories come out, there are plenty others. The victims fought and perished as we went about our daily lives.

It is not our responsibility to fight for justice, it is our right as a victim that justice be delivered. If it is my duty to work, add value to the GDP, and pay my taxes, it is your job as my elected and paid representatives, to ensure that my rights are delivered.

A population forced out on the roads for justice? What got us here? A thoroughly corrupt political class, their morals and humanity in a bottomless pit. Accentuating that is the fact that our police grow a spine only while harassing us, anything significant capitulates to the colloquial “pressure from the top”.

Today, as we celebrate our 78th Independence Day, I am scared. Scared of what the next 5 years will bring. Don’t expect me to love a country where my life depends on the whims of an illiterate goon / a dirty politician / a rich brat. Don’t expect me to help build that country. Don’t expect me to cheer for it.

Don’t Celebrate, we don’t have that right, yet. Question, question what we have become, and where we are going. The fight for freedom from political tyranny is yet to come.

The opposite of love isn’t hate, it’s indifference

Words have multiple meanings, multiple dimensions associated with them. Building on this we can conclude that a word can also have multiple inverses, one along each dimension. Two of the most defining characteristics of love would be that it is a very strong emotion and that it is a positive emotion. Along these lines of logic, we could conclude that the inverse of Love along strength dimension would be Indifference and along the valence dimension, it would be Hate. It’s quite a valid conclusion but not a very useful one. In order to assign a preference ranking to these raw emotions, let’s bring in some context.

The Holocaust refers to the genocide in Hitler’s Germany wherein millions of Jews were massacred in the name of ethnic cleansing. Hitler was a man consumed by fanatic visions of his country and the Aryan race, this distorted love also led him to believe that the Jews were a subpar race and holding Germany back. So began the extermination campaign. But the question here is, how could society be convinced of such propaganda? In post-war Germany, the people needed something to blame for the loss, their national pride had been wounded. As Hitler gave them a target, people took the bait, quite indifferent to reality. Few cared for the truth, as the situation had no direct bearing on them. It is also difficult to believe that the rest of the world had no wind of the concentration camps. In my opinion, they too were indifferent.

Hatred and Love move hand-in-hand, often love for one results in hatred for another, sometimes in quite distorted and unethical ways, but to me the real killer is indifference. It is stealthy and lethal. What is worse than a couple which keeps bickering over minuscule matters? A couple that refuses to recognize bickering matters, a couple that would prefer walking away over spending energy on the situation.

Hate at the very least means that you recognize and associate importance to the other person, and once you have recognized them you begin to learn more, spend some mental energy on the situation. In a situation involving rational, liberal people this will more often than not result in a reasonable solution.

Love > Hate > Indifference

Judging people by their clothes – musings from a visit to the bazaar

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Humans have a subconscious analyser that kicks in, the moment we set eyes on another person. This background process of forming a first impression is there for a reason, it gives us an estimate of the other person’s mood, attitude, social status and possibly a lot more. This approach, despite being quite effective in steering us clear of gun-slinging terrorists, fails quite often in modern society. Our society today is growing more secure every day while also turning into a cauldron of randomness, of individual choices that few others can appreciate. In this evolving society, I see a decline in both the requirement and the effectiveness of an initial judgement.

The way we dress and accessorise has been a very important and effective marker in this evaluation, sometime back this was leveraged to create the fashion houses of today. They fuelled this trait with ad campaigns aligning their brands with affluence, power, control and character, pushing us towards a society wherein the tag on our shirts become our identity. This kind of marketing wherein power is drawn from the no. of people believing the story has a multiplying effect. The more the no. of believers, the greater the incentive to pay for your tag. There’s also a problem with this approach, a lot of this brand value also comes from exclusivity. If everyone had the same tag, how would you stand out? Why would you pay the premium? Hence the pricing, just right to keep it from becoming pedestrian.

Amongst all of this hullabaloo, there’s a growing no. of people who are shunning “dressing-up”, instead choosing to spend on things with more substantial value, books, hobbies, travel. They are so very confident of their inner-core that they no longer have to derive importance from others. People judging us, also has an inductive effect, what others think of us and what we think of ourselves is linked. To not care what the external world makes of you, requires a discipline and confidence that takes time to build, but here as well the growth will be exponential, as more and more people decide against spending on fashion brands, it will keep becoming easier for others to shun these tags. In fact, its only natural for everyone to prefer more comfortable, cheaper clothing. In a world with no place for judging people, there really is no market for today’s flashier brands.

To a world in pajamas!!!(building rockets😉)