I am a great fan of Chuck Norris and Rajnikanth jokes, and ‘Pursuit of Happiness’ type movies, but neither of these fetch emotions out of me better than current state of affairs in India. I mean, sometimes, it is hard to decide whether I should laugh out load or cry on a particular event. Do the people around me do things deliberately or they are born that way?
Take for example Justice Katju incident, when he said that 90% of Indians are fool, because they vote in the name religion, caste,region etc. The next day , the entire media was filled with headlines ‘Justice Katju says Indians are fool’. Come on, give me a break ! The media was not even displaying the “because they vote in the name religion, caste,region etc” part in their headlines and reporting. Pathetic! After a few days, I got to hear what came to me as absolute shock, two students sent legal notice to Mr.Katju for defaming Indians by calling 90% of them fools. I was like- “Come on man, WTF!”. It was not only the media,and those two students but also a majority group on Facebook and Twitter also went sentimental about the whole issue, and I am not even counting bloggers here because they were the worst. They were coming with new techniques to justify how 90% Indians are not fools- Ridiculous !
Now, why are we so touchy? What is wrong with us? When it comes to Pakistan and China, we have all the patronizing energy in the world, but when it comes to understand a social issue about us, our balls drop off. Our intellect switches off, and we become zero. It would not be a genius task to understand that what Mr.Katju said was not factual but indicative, and in-spite of taking the real things it was indicating to, we started cursing the indicator itself. Superb! The entire discussion should have been about “why Indians vote in the name of religion, race, caste etc ?”, but it went to “How can Katju say such a thing?”. Those who were criticizing Katju didn’t even bothered to say that the points he had raised were correct and they would take care of these things before the next general elections. My house maid has been consuming tobacco for almost forty years now and she is healthy , but she never sued Government for displaying those anti-tobacco banners,all around the city, saying “You could die”, with names and faces of people who died because of that. Why? Because she got it, she understood that the posters were indicative and the real problem is tobacco. I guess she was smarter than those who went after Katju, with guns in mouth. The reply Mr.Katju filed to those two students was an epic and answer to all the “touchy and soft-soft” Indians. Here is what he replied to them- Justice Katju’s Reply
Now ,was that the end? Hell no! The saga just begun. Then came the incident of SRK. SRK in his article said that some people made him a symbol of unpatriotic things in a particular community, and he was asked to prove his patriotism by criticizing Pakistan. Obviosly he wasn’t happy about that. But wait! Here came the real champion of the Muslim cause- Mr. Rehmaan Malik. Mr. Malik went on to say that SRK should be provided security in India. Why did he say that? I don’t know, may be he has amnesia, he totally forgot that SRK is an Indian and it is duty of Indian Home Minister to take care of his security if he needs, and also that Mr. Malik is not the Indian home minister, but Pakistani interior minister. But I don’t care too much about amnesia suffering Pakistanis, but what touchy Indians would think. How did we react? “Come on man! We love SRK so much, and he said such things..sad!”, “He is an idol, if he says he is insecure, the rest would also think so”, and etc etc. First of all he didn’t say that he felt insecure. And second, why we are more worried about what he said, and why not about why he said so? So, again touchy Indians are discussing about why did SRK made such comments, everywhere- Houses, Media, Print. But I didn’t see any discussion on what should be done to avoid any such thing to happen again with SRK. Why? May be because we touchy Indians were hurt enough by what someone else told us about what SRK told that US magazine. Wooof ! You must be touchy and laborious to think all the way through this!
Next in the queue was Kamal Hasan. The pooer guy didn’t even got a chance to say what he wanted to, because apparently a few religious groups were hurt enough ,without actually watching the movie.Will you please let the people decide if the movie is of good taste or not?
Now here is the epic conclusion, only next to epic conclusion of Dark Knight series. A few days back, Mr.Kejriwal went on to say that there are thieves in parliament, and the entire community of MP’s got mad over the language he used. They delivered long speeches to remind the Team Anna about supremacy of Parliament in a democracy and slapped them with privilege notice. So, one of my friend said -“Yaar! why these people are so senti? Obviously they didn’t mean every MP, take the message, don’t shoot the messenger. Why they are not saying anything about removing such MP?”. A few weeks later, when the Justice Katju controversy broke out, he said- “Yaar! This man should have not said that, what did he mean by Indians are fools?”. I was like- “You got to be kidding me now!”. He was the one who asked MPs not to shoot the messenger, and now he himself shot one. I guess, our politicians are not so different from us, but just like us- Touchy. Just like when we got touchy during Katju, SRK and Kamal Hasan episode, they too got touchy about Team Anna’s “thieves” episode. Just like we ignored the real matter behind the controversies, and got stunned by words, they too ignored the real matter and got stunned by words. What right now it gives us to judge them? Doesn’t that make us a bunch of hypocrites?
Well we are not 100% hypocrites yet, but we are on a coarse to be. Our logics and conclusions should be driven towards “Why/How” factor, rather than “What’ factor. Or else, we could end up being an Ostrich nation where people would bury their heads in sand after looking at a problem, and going “quack quack” about the issue. This is what we must not become. So, I would suggest, don’t trust media, politicians and celebrities blindly and be an anteater, digging enough into the sand to reach where the ants are, where the real issue lies. And by the way, contrary to the famous myth, Ostrich doesn’t bury his head in sand in real. So, that leaves the sword hanging on our heads only.
WTF! Superb title! I hate politics which is beyond abundance in our nation! As you rightly said, hypocrisy will sooner or later become a ‘way of life’ in India! Loved the ending! 😛
Dhanyawad Gus for your comments. Stay fit. Stay logical and Stay tough (mentally) ! 🙂