Saturday, February 7, 2009

Its the liberal that looses

Ever day we are hearing a number of stories of people trying to make people 'moral' by beating them, stopping them from drinking , visiting pubs , asking them to behave like this and not like that.

Taken to the extreme side, I see terrorists in some asking people to follow certain religious laws. To me this is an extension of the original idea of trying to make people moral .

This has taken me to thoughts about why we have to suffer like this . In my observation, there always has been a fight between progression and regression just like there has been between adharma and dharma in Mahabahart time. A progression is about having a culturally diverse set of people around you where law is respected and everyone is listened to . Even though people may not agree with each other but they still respect diversity. While regression is sticking to policies that only some people think are right, is generally divisive in nature and favours one set of thinking over other. It also means taking up the causes which are detrimental to concept of individual thinking while forcing conformance.

But the problem with regression is that of degeneration. If you see, our neighbour country is now in the path of regression because mature democracy , rule of law never existed there. Rule of law never existed in India too but we were at least aware that we need to live together and though it was uneasy existence always made sure that we were at least democratic.

In my opinion , there can be only two paths that are available to a human being. One, is of 100 % tolerance and second of any kind of intolerance. There is no place in between . Any kind of intolerance will lead us one day to 100 % intolerance in due course of time . We may hate a person and what he is , how he feels, how he dresses but we may never cause a harm to his existence, his self worth. If we do tomorrow , we do not have right to say anything if a harm comes to us .

All these intolerance leads people to get afraid. Normal people like you and me are afraid of hurt and humiliation that comes with intolerance. However ,this is a time for introspection. Looking around, we can see a number of people we loathed. People from different regions , religions, sex, status , we hated everyone once and all. Not only this ,we sometimes made sure that the hurt was passed on them . In turbulent times like this , when liberals are under attack, we have to introspect if we have any shred of intolerance left. If we are pure , then only we can fight for our ways . However , if we take pride in lording over one another while proclaiming ourselves as a liberal , I don't see how we can be united in face of conservative , ill-liberal onslaught. Remember, the forces of adhrama wants dharma to lose and we have to fight it every day.