No, please do not let the title of our blog fool you in to thinking that I want to buy some fancy I-phone. No way! I am very happy with my simple but super-efficient android. The title refers to an unfortunate event, the sad saga of the Chandvade family from Sambhaji Nagar.
Honestly, it is tough to understand that entire episode. Earlier, too, in Pune itself, some four kilometers away from my place, a nine year old had committed suicide because the father did not buy the coveted sweater. At least, it was a kid who was involved in that tragedy!
How can a nineteen year old not understand his truck driver father's financial plight? Actually, it is our own creativity, and not a mechanical device, that leads to great work. Want proof? Look at the superb cinematography of "Barsaat" (1949) by Jal Mistry who was debuting at the age of twenty-five!
Why is the next generation, alpha, beta, Z, whatever so insensitive? In an India, where the poverty index is physically visible everywhere, how can a son in his late teens hold a middle class family ransom for a mobile device!?! How come his parents' fervent appeals could not move him? Why, the whole village was trying to convince him!
What exactly is the cause of such extreme behaviour? Excessive indulgence by parents? Total lack of discipline leading to rash thoughtlessness? Did he not develop any self control? Inflated self-centered ego that would never take a 'no'? Total lack of sensitivity and/or respect for others beyond oneself?
As much as the family is responsible for the horrid tragedy, equally responsible is our society, too. Becoming highly consumerist, people today (so self-obsessed they are that it is difficult to call them citizens!) measure their own and others' worth by the price of the silly gadgets.
To buy these actually meaningless appendages, families are drowned under massive debts. The so-called shine is the tip of the iceberg called the hefty EMI's, the monthly tension given the coarse methods used by the recovery agents, and other such absolutely unnecessary dead-ly details.
We are a society in transition. Lost (most often consciously, and without any conscience) are the traditional moorings. Under the name of empty (and misunderstood) modernity vacantly borrowed from Hollywood depictions of the Western world are chased life styles without any groundings.
Actually, proper Western families are never extravagant. Their Protestant work ethic would hardly allow them to be so. The taxation slabs there as well as life style maintenance happen to be so high that most people there live the middle class life which is highly religious and family-oriented, too.
No, you do not need to read any great literature to understand such realities. Millions of YouTube videos would show the harsh realities of the glamorous life abroad. Yet silly Indians never learn from them the right values, do they?
Sadness as well as frustration, vexation and empty helpless annoyance, such is the mix of feelings one experiences when one encounters such impossible behaviour! Indeed, how even to say 'Lord, help them, they know not what they do!'
Pratima@ The colonial slavishness is so entrenched in the average Indian psyche that for such "brown" fools following fashions at the cost of one's own health is okay. The KFC food ordered online, tight jeans, extremely poor, downright wrong English they would have, but they think of themselves as "modern"! Pitiable beyond words!
Quite of the day: "And we are here/ as on a darkling plain/Swept with confused alarms/ of struggle and flight,/Where ignorant armies clash by night." So described Mathew Arnold the plight of being neither nor there.
Word of the day: flabbergasted. This adjective means shocked beyond words.
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