AvantGarde

Independence Day was celebrated in IIT Kanpur campus with much vigor and color and with the cultural program being performed by students. Here we have a mixture of students coming from all over the country and we in a true sense represent the fundamentals of the country that is “Unity in Diversity”. But have we the people of country been able to preserve this fundamental, is the reason to celebrate Independence Day in real for all our countrymen, this question always perturbed me and whatever doubt I have is not hypothetical, the incidence that happened during this Independence Day itself put some credence to my thought.

This 15^th August we witnessed something that nobody who believes in Indian Democracy could have thought off; mass exodus of Northeastern communities leaving their workplace to return back to their hometown. They started fleeing Bangalore, Chennai after SMS threats spread like a wildfire among their communities. Newspaper reported this as retaliation to the incidence that happened in Kokrajhar, Assam. However the prejudice and racial discrimination  committed on the people coming from other state is nothing new in general and there have been many more instances of threatening in past. To add few examples a section in Mumbai always threaten people coming from North-India, a senior minister in Delhi government related the problems of Delhi with the people coming from Bihar and Uttar-Pradesh.  Killing of Bihari Laborer’s in Assam and many more. But all these incidences are very different in nature from the one that happened this August.

Firstly we saw the exodus of huge proportion with the magnitude of almost forty thousand and that too in a few days to count which couldn’t have been possible without social media and wide telecom networks. In democracy we always support the free speech and the medium that promotes it is always encouraged. But this time Twitter, Facebook, SMS’s became the new weapon to promote hate speech on the lines of free speech. However the damage was already done, but the Government reacted to put limit on SMS’s up to five for a day. For the very first time any censorship on the free speech was welcomed by most people in the country.

This brings to my second point the slow, inactive and arbitrary decisions of Government that do no good for the country. Since last year The Government has been trying to put some limit or censorship to these social media, though the reason they used to put were inadequate and sometimes too blatant as in the case they asked Facebook, Twitter, Google to remove offensive content on politicians. England also saw a riot last year, Twitter and Facebook played a role in promoting it but Englishmen have learned the lesson, they can’t change the system so they have to adopt it. After that incidence London Police Department came with their own twitter account “metpoliceuk”, New York also came with their account as @nypd, which guided locals how to tackle such situation. Indian Government too can adopt modern technology to fight against its ill-will.  Even the local police can use this modern technology to post profiles of terrorist, thugs and suspects to warn citizens.

The last but not the least is self-restrain and respect for others, which used to be a typical Indian Identity, is losing in the chase for success. The chase for success maybe not that bad, but in its pursuit we can’t let our culture to degrade. Over the years the harsh working condition and turbulent times have made us aggressive in our behavioral approach. The other dimension of this condition is being insouciant or unconcerned behavior. In both the ways it harms our society, the aggressiveness will never think twice while hurting the sentiments of receiver. The unconcerned characteristic doesn’t care even for their neighbors, gone are those days when aunties of neighbors had hours to spend with themselves, these days in metro even the neighbors in the same apartment don’t know each other and if they have any conversation it happens to be in some professional way. Had this culture not been cultivated the exodus that we saw in huge proportion could have been avoided with some confidence build-up from neighbors.

I hope to see the change happen and will close the article with the famous and encouraging words of Mark Twain, “So far as I am able to judge, nothing has been left undone, either by man or nature, to make India the most extraordinary country that the sun visits on his rounds. Nothing seems to have been forgotten, nothing overlooked”.

Nishu Navneet

MBA Batch of 2014