why so much cynicism?

a possible diagnosis of what ails us

sometimes when i think about the country i begin to think that we just are not realising our potential in so many fields..i am sure you have all felt that way sometimes.... a country of more than a billion people with such a large percentage of youth should be doing so much more than just becoming an IT hub for the world and answering calls by (often retarded..if you were to believe chetan bhaghat at least) Americans....

now let's get this clear... i am neither experienced enough nor in any other way even remotely qualified to be able to produce a list of measures that must be taken.. but surely, there do exist sufficient number of such people in the country? what then is stopping us from achieving what is ours only if we want it enough?


so much for rhetoric.

it seems to me that an overwhelming cynicism has conquered us at some time in the past... a cynicism towards government, towards progress, towards idealism, righteousness, life in itself..

this cynicism has in turn bred a defeatist attitude .... and blinded the people of a great nation to a magnificent destiny that had been so well set up by its past, and led them off course....

at the root of all evil plaguing this country lies this cynicism... well-educated young proven leaders are cynical of politics and are content with limiting their role in goverment to airing their critical views in light-hearted social conversations ,the unscrupulous taxpayer confronts his conscience with a these-frauds-are-going-to-eat-it-all-up-anyway-might-as well-keep-it-to-myself-attitude, the same indian man who spits out his paan(not to mention unmentionables) on our streets becomes quite the perfect gentleman when transferred to another place... logic being it is not going to make a difference on our streets when there are thousand others who will anyway go ahead and spit there....

well one is astonished that the majority people do not realise that this attitude takes us no where... change must begin from the self... because if everyone thinks that wrong becomes less wrong when everyone else does it then wrong no longer has a moral implication to it.... and is reduced to a popular classification.... which, i must emphasise , is philosophically a shame.... for what is morally right is not necesarily, and in fact in some cases rarely, popularly right.
this road only leads to stagnation if not degeneration.

surprisingly the attitude is more dominant among the educated classes....and some even consign themselves to lifelong cynicism because they consider it a safeguard to protect themselves from their acquired notion of the world which, if i may add, is extremely distorted. the uneducated masses at least have an optimism that springs from their innocence.... essentially their ability to hope is preserved by their ignorance...and the schools and universities that should produce zestful young men and women ready to go out and conquer the world seem to be instead producing people eminently content with the ordinary, people happy to just sit around and earn a living....

this attitude has blended into our people so much that the only evidence that it is not an integral part of the indian mindset comes from our glorious past....a lone source of hope that it may be rooted out....this past, unfortunately, though remembered, is being remembered in ways other than one feels its architects would have wanted...and our nostalgia for the past has led some among us to denounce progress in itself and embrace stagnation as a means to go back through the ages and recreate the days of yore.... which does great injustice to the dynamism that seems to have existed so prominently in those days, as pandit nehru points out in his moving account of indian history, the 'discovery of india'.

this attitude then is what i believe is stopping the youth of this country from breaking the shackles and surging ahead to a great future. a mindset full of hope, vitality and zest is essential to dynamism and progress.

visionaries are men who think about achieving success instead of about avoiding defeat.
there can be no visionaries without hope and where every man is a visionary, none shall stop that place from becoming a paradise.

hoping to have contributed even if only in a small way
dinesh jayaraman


whoa i just read this whole thing again..
like,sheesh...i must actually be getting serious!... :)