Monday, June 11, 2007

Protecting the Unknown....

Look around and you will find lots of organisations trying to protect something....well, protecting the elements like Water, Earth and other things makes a lot of sense since they impact the society in one way or the other. But then there are organisations which seem to protect things like Culture, Language, Regions from outsiders...and so on. I wonder what exactly they want to do here. Of course expressing concern and protests are one way of doing it...but we nowadays take the road of violence and stringent action to make our point.

If 20th century was responsible for liberalisation from colonialism and the consecutive drawing of boundaries across the world; the present era demands for a society without any boundaries. I agree that it's our duty to preserve our culture and language but you just cannot ignore the influences that we have in our day to day lives. Take the case of language itself....we go as far as banning schools from teaching with English as the primary medium with the pretext that it might obliterate the respective regional mother tongue. But on the other hand we want everyone to rise up to the current demand of speaking a global language?!!! Is this possible....how can you have both??!! Isn't there a serious mismatch of what we are doing and what we are supposed to do??!!....Another example of such protection is about the wealth and land from foreign settlers....Till 1947 we fought against Britishers and then 60 years later too...we are fighting...but this time it's among ourselves!

Why do we fight among ourselves?? Economic differences are one major cause of this fighting; but what I find it more amusing is that why people blame others for their misery??!! It's not like they were eating in the same plate!!!....In most of the cases the notion that the land belongs to the original inhabitants of the land and so its resources there after should also belong to the native people. What we forget here is the effort that these supposed outsiders among our own people put in to develop those resources...We see this in places like Andhra Pradesh where the demand for a separate Telengana is gaining support day by day. I wonder had Hyderabad been in some other region, would this movement have been this strong??!!....Even in Karnataka we have these organisations which fight for the protection of Kannada and also the notion that all the riches of Bengaluru are being swooped away by the outsiders in the city is just too strong!!....

With the globalisation phenomenon taking centre stage in the present age, there's obviously going to be movement of jobs, money to different regions in the world. And in India it happened to be Bangalore, Hyderabad, Chennai while Mumbai and Delhi were among the list long before big businesses started in the southern cities. It's the innate nature of humans to feed upon resources where they are available in plenty....this is exactly the reason why there's movement of people within the nation...so, instead of resisting such movement, and much worse seeking some kind of security for the locals under these circumstances through reservations and quotas; we have to adapt for what the situation demands...as Thomas Friedman in his book "The World is Flat" says, if someone wants to keep his job, gone are the days when one can promise lifelong employment....it's the time when you have to show others that you are employable.

Boundaries are diminishing, we are going to live in a place called Earth where each nation is connected to one another by zillions of optical fibres...What we need to understand is that, however foreign we might dress, sound, talk, dress...but within we are still what we are. And what exactly is that....maybe each one of us understand what we are made of....!

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