'Things fall apart; the centre cannot hold
Mere anarchy is loosed upon the world...
The best lack all conviction, while
The worst are full of passionate intensity.'--W B Yeats
The above lines, composed 70 years ago ,still hold good for the Indian predicament while the country is faced with a Lok Sabha poll and power-obsessed politicians lay bare the worst inside them. Leadership tends to degenerate into populism, governance into corrupt status quo, media into hype and hysteria, discourse into cacophony, radicalism into compromise (sleeping with the enemy ?). Intolerance, regionalism, nursing narrow identities hold the people and the system (such as it is) to ransom at almost without notice.
The democratic Tantra has been mastered to (im)perfection, while the mantra is lost.
Do we really deserve all this ? Should we have allowed the present politicians and their chamchas to hijack the agenda for a new, vibrant,secular,democratic and liberal India. Is it not high time that we came out of our self-imposed helplessness and applied, committed ourselves to the task of defining the agenda and taking it to the people so that elections will cease to be an expensive rigmarole of
replacing one incompetent coalition by another?
Politics has to be taken to the real issues of the people - poverty, disparity, unemployment, ill-health, illiteracy,lack of opportunity and subjugation to the touts and brokers of the establishment. For this the entire political economy has to be redrafted. The key fields of agriculture, industry,trade, communications,infrastructure development, energy, education have to be properly studied and rejuvenated with practical innovations.
Aping the so-called developed societies should stop forthwith; so should cease the glorification of images from the past. We need not look far behind; nor need we look far ahead; we must look discretely into the' here and now' and come up with practical, creative solutions to the problems of India.
I am launching SEARCH for SOLUTIONS-INDIA as a humble beginning to end the isolation of intelligentsia from the steering of the country.
HOW?
Let us start with sharing our ideas,observations,our perceptions of state policy in the respective fields we work in. Let us not separate this exercise from our livelihood or our liking--because we have to start the reassessment of the system at the point of our interaction.
Use this blog space to communicate with like-minded ,restless members of your profession so that over a period of time (hopefully not too long) a comprehensive critique of the policy will emerge and pave way to the draft of a new policy which can then be taken to the people with the help of the various media.
If we do this exercise for a period of three to six months, we may
presumably have a separete blog for each field -searchforsolutionsindiaagriculture- for example.
There are no conditions to the membership. Experience, knowledge, an analytical mindset, brevity and lucidity of expression should suffice.
A positive outlook and a strong belief that the search for solutions
exercise is certain to succeed is a must--though skeptics are also
welcome as they will always help to raise the standard of ideation.
Let us start the march to ensure a FUTURE for ALL.
