Are We There?

What would you change about modern society?

We have two offices in two different blocks of the same building. Recently, an influential opinion builder from the other block commented on how the senior lady officers of this block were having fun and laughed and cracked jokes during lunch time from which he readily inferred that they did not have much work. He was referring to lunch hour, right? How did that imply the ladies were not work centric?

We have male officers who while their time on mobile in the corridors disturbing others loudly instructing their wives on baby to daily household management. Yet no opinion monger has a piece of advice for them.

In one of the far North-eastern states, two underage girls of a particular community were made to walk naked and one of them later gang raped by unidentified miscreants. The media and social platforms went on a frenzy over it. From penning melancholic poems on hopelessness to burning critiques to offering political solutions et all. The viral video which made international headlines was intended to create mass havoc. It did giving opportunity to callous tongues to remark that such incidents were commonplace and happened in other States as well thereby attempting to trivialize the matter.

My house help is chronic anaemic. Her husband is a drunkard. Obviously, he does not have much role to play apart from abusing his wife and children and demanding explanations if his wife came late home once in a while after a day’s laborious work.

I told her to get her haemoglobin checked at intervals if she wanted to live a healthy life and earn a livelihood. She told me she had her own “means” if she was disabled permanently. Funny, she was willing to die than lead a healthy life. Perhaps she had nothing to look forward to and death seemed a better option if she was rendered physically invalid.

Lately these glimpses of our society have perturbed me and compelled to think. There are many other ills – casteism, socio-economic backwardness, illiteracy, unemployment, patriarchy, blatant use of muscle power etc. etc. But all these maladies have a single face – bruised and battered women.

The title of this blog is just a mild pointer towards our existential crisis. The roots are deeper and time worn. The bias cuts across the cross section of a humongous populace of the largest democracy of the world and a growing economy – from ultra urban milieu of Metros to the remotest of rural, rustic backwaters – the story is the same.

In sharp contrast, this is also the country which worships Goddesses as manifests of Shakti or Power – the Supreme Creative and also Destructive Force. This contrarian element triggers another vital question, ” Are we really modern?”