Wednesday, March 16, 2005

There are all kinds of utopia people have imagined about and written about but the one which is the most addressed is the one based on complete equality;no division between the rich and poor,or for that matter no division on any basis and high levels of goodwill characterising relations between people.

But one thing most of these forget to mention is that equality doesn't mean identical,it doesn't mean sameness.They are as different from each other as similar triangles and congruent triangles. According to me,in a true utopian society,people should be equal but also different.

Now as far as the Indian scenario goes, for centuries together our society has been stratified thanks to the corruption of many vedic concepts where the society was divided mainly in terms of 'guna' which later corrupted to 'profession' and ultimately it became 'hereditary'.We had an hierarchy where a class of people were considered superior to the other and hence they were ill-treated.

And since independence, very renowned scholars thought the best way to help the people lowest in the hierarchy was to elevate them to the top and then gift them with goodies.Now,this lead to a more complicated problem.An hierarchy creeped into the so-called lower castes and hence the whole 'goodies' concept failed.

It has been 57 years and we have still not understood the futility of the exercise,instead we are planning to extend this to the private sector.What I suggest is not to leave it to the government to take care of the upliftment of unprivileged people.There should be affirmative action taken by the private sector,each and every individual should try to contribute not in kind,but actually come forward and try to help people by educating them or atleast ensuring that each one of them gets a decent education.This I think will have very far reaching effects.One,this will make more and more people self-reliant.Once they are self-reliant,they will have more clear ideas on what is good for them and they will definitely become more human,by which I mean they will start thinking not just about themselves but also about the people around them.I think such a society will be a very just society.Once this happens,I think that is the day we can say,'Not only did we realise what our rights are as citizens of a free nation,but we also realised what our responsibilities are'

1 comment:

Chintamani said...

Thanks for the post,whoever it was,I think it is always encouraging to have a comment 3 times that of the actual post.

PS:And whatever it was I didn't read it.As I don't care about some EGTY is doing at $0.15