By Shalini Ghosh:
The world has given a new meaning to modernisation. While the dictionary still reads the meaning of the word as “relating to the present or recent times as opposed to the remote past,” some of us think it is to be fractious to our cultures.
But, with the type of ‘modernisation’ we are up to nowadays, we are not going any further.
All this while, we had completely been intransigent about homosexuality, tagging it to be ‘abnormal’ because that’s not the way we are used to be. That’s not our perception of ‘right’.
What happened to the tolerance that we boast about having? Even primeval people were more tolerant, and open to new perspectives. That is exactly why we do not rub stones to ignite fire anymore.
With a tiny fragment of the population of our country being public servants, we don’t have enough police or enough courts to attend to those thousands of piled up cases, but we definitely have enough police forces to beat up unmarried couples. While the system forgives a juvenile for brutally raping and killing a girl and makes sure to hide his face from the outside world, the same system is okay with beating up couples in public for just being found together in hotel rooms on the grounds of ‘public indecency’.
All this, in the name of preserving cultures? Does this culture give us permission to kill a person for eating beef?
With over 270 million starving people in the country, we are more worried about what a person eats.
Oh, wait! We were protecting our religion, right? We worship the cow. We were protecting our god. We were punishing the people who disrespected him.
Well, I don’t know how far mankind is going to go, but we surely have come a very long way. We have come so far, that now we think we can protect God.
We have come so far, that we think the one who created us, needs our help to be protected.
So far, that we don’t trust his justice anymore. Rather we take up governing in our hands and serve justice on his behalf.
So, at the end of the day, we have succeeded in making India modern, normal, cultured, religious and right. Or should that be ‘Bharat’. After all changing names make huge differences.