In the moods of celebration of “Indian Independence day” with full Josh ( though I am lil’ late to catch up on this :) ) I would like to add some thoughts. As a routine habit of reading news along with my morning tea, I was browsing through the websites for daily news; browsing instead of reading papers since I am in US (of A) and have the luxuries of reaching the e-paper or you can also call it as a lack of access to usual paperwalah’s Indian newspapers.
After reading the news and the stories that reputed personalities has to tell about the current state of India and the media at work, I am left with a mixed feeling. Like many other Indians I am aslo proud to read about the “Golden Boy Abhinav Bindra” who has put India on Olympics records this year. But I also get to read that a sum of 10 crore rupees amount was spent on his training and practise! Can any common man afford to dream of atleast reaching the national level competition? What happens to the common man’s dream to become a sportsman and to venture his dreams of making it BIG(G).
One of the reputed filmmakers’ says “If one in each family becomes computer literate, our nation will be transformed” – I just don’t have words to exclaim!
More than half of the Indian population stays below poverty line as mentioned by APJ Abdul Kalam, to be precise, ’220 million people living below the poverty line shows the failure of our system’. Whole of this majority (or should I call them as minority as though huge in number they don’t have a voice in the society) of people struggle for one-time meal to fill their stomach, left apart is the thought of literacy. If I assume that we are talking about families meaning who can afford to have a home, yet again major chuck of the population is from rural background. To describe how rural population live, I would like to narrate one of my personal experiences.
As a part of rural education & teaching (also tried on teaching computer basics, since that’s my field) I participate in a school teaching program routinely (run by a bunch of people with a motive to help) where we teach the basic subjects and introduced them with computers basics as well. In the school, we took our laptops to show them some videos on the basic concepts on science. To the wonder we couldn’t show them the demo for long for the whole day as there was no POWER SUPPLY in the school; though from then on I make it a point to keep my laptop fully charged, but still I have addressed only the problem(of mine) for couple of hours, whereas the rural schools, families, farmers, has to live with the problem everyday! Without having power even to run their pumps!!
So whom does the crowd constitute of when we say “each and every family in the nation” here?
Does our conscience still allow us to sport our Tricolor flag for ‘a day‘ as an armband, flag on cars/cubicles, paint-on-faces ?
YESSSSSSS……
A person can still claim to feel proud because he/she has bought it at the traffic signal from the poor child under the sun, to help the child make some money!
Ignorance is real Bliss… :)
