I was thinking further as to why our heritage sites are as they are, and in the end I came to the conclusion that, why on earth would we value our heritage sites, when we do not value even human life.
Look at all the terrorist attacks that have happened in India and the humungous damage it has done to property and human life. But does it even matter to us once the media frenzy and attention on the attack fades? Life moves on and we remember about such things only when we have another terrorist attack. Media glorifies this as "Spirit of Mumbaikars"....
Situation in a place like Kashmir is even more horrible, where people keep dying of such attacks daily, and it doesn't even find a place in news paper columns or headlines of news channels.
Till we do not value human life, there is no way that we will ever value heritage sites .... Truly a sorry state of affairs ....
Soluiton is to sensitize people about such things so that we value lives of our fellow beings ....
3 comments:
Sensitizing people is a very difficult undertaking. It takes years and years, and even if you are able to awaken a true feeling in someone, some sympath or empathy, it usually does not last.
It is the cause of almost all problems...wht is the solution?
One of the reasons for "de-sensitization" is that, India still lacks a unifying identity. A blast in Kashmir, to the guy in Mumbai is as distant and remote as a blast in Iraq. There is no single sense of identity.
I blame part of it on the creation of independant identities by divinding the nation into states on the basis on language and existing national boundaries. It serves to preserve historical differences between people and does nothing to unify them.
You never feel like your people died, or that you could be one of them.
Of course, this is just one of the issues, one other issue that I can think of, is a general lack of self worth and confidence in the Indian. If you do not value your life, no one will. If you agree to hang off trains and ride on top of buses, and do not demand the right to a safe life, no one is going to give it to you. It is a democratic nation, if the people want safety and security of their lives, they will get it. The Constitution guarantees the right to life and liberty and ideally, the government cannot do anything that will make you unwillingly risk it. We don't even value our own time, let alone our lives, it is kind of tough to expect us to value other's :-)
Just the eternal cynic in me up there!
@phoenix : I agree its a difficult task and will take time, but its worth doing it ... and it needs to be done to the young generation, children. We need to totally "revamp" our "Social Science" curriculum. Do you remember, how we used to hate "Civics" as a subject, and totally neglect "History"??? The reason is it sounded so bookish and boring. The solution is my opinion is to change our curriculum such that "Civics" as a subject is interesting .. and kids get a chance to follow it. Habits that are developed in that tender age, last longer. That in my way is the only way out .... how ever slow it might be ...
@dkaimal "general lack of self worth and confidence " might have been a reality in 70's, 80's and probably early 90's. That is when we had what was called as the "hindu growth rate". And in general the morale of people was down ... I think, that was to do with the "socialistic" economics of the country.
90's are a totally different. We see revival of a strong nationalistic" feeling and "reforms". So today the confidence is not an issue in my humble opinion for many indians ... though they might not be a booming majority, but still, its a sizable number which contributes to the GDP of country.
I will write a seperate blog where we can discuss the "independant entities" :-)
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