Of Human Rights

 Human rights! Are they new or are they old concepts reclaimed anew? Well, both these stances are both right and brand new! Why? How? Let us get to know now.

Let us begin with the religious treatises. What do they all chant? Let all be happy, let all be healthy, let all be wealthy, and, oh, yes, let all be wise! This prayer for the (w)holistic growth is what the human rights, too, aspire to. In that sense, the concept of human rights is ancient. 

Yet, in a way, it is absolutely rooted in the recent past though. It was the unthinkable cruelty unleashed during the World War II that made the need for human rights urgent. The Holocaust proved the  thoughtless beastliness inherent in the so-called human heads and hearts whose vicious cruelty would make the weirdest animals, if any at all, blush with mortification. 

The Jews were massacred en masse because of their superiority and the mean jealousies it fostered, and the ugly misconceptions fuelled by the vested interests. If this genocide was not enough to shame humanity, the Hiroshima havoc proved how technology, abetted by hurt nationalistic/racist ego, could wreck total destruction.

The World War II proved wrong all the rational ameliorative promises the West believed in since the Enlightenment, nay, even before, since the humanism that the Renaissance homocentric or anthropocentric vision glorified. The evil, in brief, dominant and latent in human hearts-n-heads needed to be tamed.

Hence the assurance thence of human rights that promise a fair and just treatment, whatever may be the class, caste, creed, religion, region, gender, language, age of a human being. Any discrimination due to any one and/or all of these intolerances is criminalised due to the introduction of the human rights paradigm.

Well, the problem with the human rights is double currently. In a way, the U.N., the agency meant to assent and assert human rights is toothless on one hand, while, on the other, the Industrial Revolution 4.0 is  drafting newer injustices in its wake. Well, we all are already more than neck deep in trouble, even if we were to forget the climate bubble about to burst! For our own good, for our own survival, human rights are the need of the hour! 

Pratima@Let us all pledge to observe the human rights at both the macro and the micro levels.