Dear Friend and Fellow Citizen
The Indian citizen has been incessantly buffeted and bullied over decades by the political and corporate class of the country.
Over sixty years we have mutated from citizen to mere consumer. We have been reduced to a herd of cattle, milked frequently off votes, while we are prodded to further nourishment on a diet of consumerism. As a consequence we citizens have been anaesthetised into apathy and indifference. Our minds have been progressively dulled by apparent prosperity into shirking our duties and responsibilities as citizens while the nexus of political and corporate establishments arrogantly pursue their machinations.
We are being marginalised within our physical, psychological and most importantly civic spaces, fed on an illusion of the greatest good for the greatest number while the contrary is happening.
We are terrorised from without and within our borders, expected to follow diktats on who is Indian and who is not, who is a patriot and who is not, who is secular and who is not, what we can read and see and what we cannot, what is and is not our heritage, who should and should not be our Prime Minister while the perils of the global economy keep us busy eking a livelihood.
It is time we proved our strength on the floor of the country by giving ourselves a much needed vote of confidence, proving our majority and using the same with responsibility to the greatest benefit of all.
In striving for that majority we citizens must conceive, design and implement strategies that are non-violent in word and deed; engage in dialogue and relentlessly pursue the path of conflict resolution towards consensus in a world replete with combative language and violent deeds.
In times of moral and ethical poverty in all walks of life we require to engage the conscience of fellow citizens and work towards a consensus no matter how cumbersome and insurmountable the task might appear.
We might not wish to engage in active politics for myriad reasons but we can easily restore to ourselves a citizens’ democracy built on the foundation of transparency, ethics and compassion.
The Indian citizen has been incessantly buffeted and bullied over decades by the political and corporate class of the country.
Over sixty years we have mutated from citizen to mere consumer. We have been reduced to a herd of cattle, milked frequently off votes, while we are prodded to further nourishment on a diet of consumerism. As a consequence we citizens have been anaesthetised into apathy and indifference. Our minds have been progressively dulled by apparent prosperity into shirking our duties and responsibilities as citizens while the nexus of political and corporate establishments arrogantly pursue their machinations.
We are being marginalised within our physical, psychological and most importantly civic spaces, fed on an illusion of the greatest good for the greatest number while the contrary is happening.
We are terrorised from without and within our borders, expected to follow diktats on who is Indian and who is not, who is a patriot and who is not, who is secular and who is not, what we can read and see and what we cannot, what is and is not our heritage, who should and should not be our Prime Minister while the perils of the global economy keep us busy eking a livelihood.
It is time we proved our strength on the floor of the country by giving ourselves a much needed vote of confidence, proving our majority and using the same with responsibility to the greatest benefit of all.
In striving for that majority we citizens must conceive, design and implement strategies that are non-violent in word and deed; engage in dialogue and relentlessly pursue the path of conflict resolution towards consensus in a world replete with combative language and violent deeds.
In times of moral and ethical poverty in all walks of life we require to engage the conscience of fellow citizens and work towards a consensus no matter how cumbersome and insurmountable the task might appear.
We might not wish to engage in active politics for myriad reasons but we can easily restore to ourselves a citizens’ democracy built on the foundation of transparency, ethics and compassion.
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