“Everything is okay.”
This expression is something that we—the unaffected and the privileged—believe in, until something terrible happens closer home, either to our people or to us. “Rapes are happening, but everything is okay because it didn’t happen to me or my sister or my daughter or my mother.” “Journalists are getting shot in the head, but everything is okay because there are other journalists who can report and I can obtain news from.”
“The government is promising Ram Mandir, and not education and jobs, but everything is okay because I was fortunate enough to get an education and land a stable job.” “University students, the youth and the future of the country, absolutely unarmed and innocent are, time and again, being beaten up brutally, stripped off their hijabs and dignity and subjected to tear gas shells and lathi charge, but everything is okay because I am not a student anymore, or I am not a student of that particular university, or I don’t live in that city!”
Here’s a bubble breaker. Everything is NOT okay! And nothing will be—as long as we don’t broaden our minds and sensibilities. As long as we keep seeing what we want to see, continue reading what we want to read and keep listening to what we want to hear, while we pretend that everything is okay. Because, we are all heading towards a day when we will burn in the same hellfire set by the fascist evil, which set the values of our Constitution ablaze. Darkness will engulf everywhere we look. The day is not far when we will not remain a Socialist Sovereign Secular Democratic Republic.
Thus, I am urging each citizen of India to take a step towards dethroning the evil that no force, whether police or military, can fight. The evil that is sitting and joyously “ruling” at the heart of our nation, the mother we all have and the mother who is injured and profoundly threatened right now. Join and initiate protests, post videos showing the truth, engage in discourses on social media, express, speak up, scream, call for media coverage and reach out to as many as you can.
And those who are or will be joining protests just for fun and an adrenaline rush, do not take all this lightly and do your part because you are all part of “we the people”, a commonly used phrase in this nation. Because you fed off and lived years and years of your life in this country, the country that is your mother, and right now, our mother is in danger.
Dear reader, everything is not okay. A dialogue from a very famous Bollywood film states, “No country is perfect, but it is on us to make it better.” Let’s stand by this. Let’s live by this.