Enlightened Urbanites!

Mumbai is a city of dreams for Indians. When you look at the monuments here, you are lost in the wonders of the amazing architecture, when you visit the museums, you are spellbound by the riches of the art when you visit the restaurants, you doubt the many places you have graced in the lure of gourmet meals when you look at the buildings, gigantic and magnificent, you admire in immense bewilderment. This phenomenon, no doubt, remains unequivocally consistent with urban India. It lives up to the expectations of one and all, at the first sight. But when we dig deeper, we find the same city reeling with poverty, unemployment, bias, hypocrisy, and what not. Do we choose to part with the latter?

I seriously doubt it. We prefer to stay indoors. We prefer to enjoy the riches and beauty while carefully ignoring the evil. We have never been and will never in the future be stupid enough to get into the action mode or dirty our hands. We play safe, don’t we?

We love our country and people and empathize with the downtrodden and thoroughly believe that that is more than enough. We reason that with the idea of being too busy with our schedules. After all, we are the ones running the economy of the country. We empower people by not empowering anyone at all. We love to remain in our ghettos and “fight” our own devils. Is that not good enough? we reason. We are truly the captains of the ship. The ship which is already sunk and all we are engaged in is to carry the remnants of the same meticulously so as not to cause suspicion of the casualty occurred long back in our able hands.

We are the ones visiting our gods offering prayers in the name of religion. We follow sacred Geeta and Quran and Bible and Guru Granth, all offering to have a single sacred thread of oneness.

But that is not being religious. We prefer to live by our religion, our Gods, our traditions and we also tend to annul any other Gods that come our way in the name of religion. We must not bear patience as it might question our purity in faith, must we?

We are the praiseworthy contractors of the social system, that should never be defiled and compromised in the names of marriage, work, or equality. We unanimously believe that society should not function without its torchbearer, the enlightener, that tries to keep the sanctity of social differences intact. After all, any mix would entail a lot of criticism and who are we to counter those sanctimonious thoughts and beliefs, prevalent since the Vedic age, which we inherited centuries ago? Rather, we should incorporate them into our daily chores. But I wonder, aren’t we doing that already? Oh, what a relief! We are on the path of greatness.

We are the good old followers of bigwigs who in the name of entertainment torture us, diminish us, and break us into bits for we know nothing how their world operates. We worship our entertainers and remain at their mercy, hardly delving deep enough to understand how we make them our “good old lords”. We talk about these entertainers with pride and pompous as if to pay our reverence they hardly deserve for once their work of tricking is over in the name of fun-tainments which are nothing more than pieces of junk, hardly do they show us any decency. They are the B-word dons, showing no mercy towards the vulnerable. But isn’t that right? I have always known to believe in -Survival of the fittest! Who cares for anything else, huh!

We must not raise our voice against any practices prevalent in society, let alone be any evil ones. Are we trying to reject the good old thoughts of our ancestors and forefathers? No, never. How can we be so unmindful and thoughtless? Will that not be blasphemy? How can we indeed be “paap ke bhagidar”?

We choose to remain as efficient as narrowly possible in our work, trying to make our ends meet, as in moving in cars, living in bungalows, shopping in the malls, eating outside. But that is just so little, isn’t it?

We must not keep ourselves away from such small happiness, no? My friend calls it, Sasti khushiyan.

Is it at all too much to ask for? Nahi na?

 We are the enlightened Urbanites, okay!

 

Thank you.