ELECTIONS '98
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Change the world

Growing up with television has made many of us masters of the flip-scan. Grab hold of the remote, switch channels continuously, pausing for only a fraction of a second to decide if something is worth watching, and then we're gone, our attention spans seeking something better. And once again last week I found myself engaged in this sport, searching without success for the elixir of entertainment. Harrison Ford reruns, some political games in Iraq, kids' cartoons, guns, one by one the familiar images that cement our boredom flashed by.

And then a little girl came on, talking about her upcoming scout camp. For whatever reason, I stopped flipping channels, perhaps because she was obviously elated about the camp she's going to. The DJ asked all the predictable questions. What do you look forward to, Laura? Do you think you'll like camp? What do you think you'll learn? And the answers were no less unusual - Laura wanted to learn to interact politely with others, be confident of herself, learn new skills, blah, blah, blah, it's all so predictable. Clearly Mommy has rehearsed the lines well.

And then, unexpectedly, the DJ asked her a question she hasn't heard before. "Why do you want to learn these things, Laura?" For a while, there was an awkward silence as the child groped for an answer, trying to think of one. And then, with little more than the conviction of a child's heart, Laura knocked me over with her reply. In the plainest voice you can ever imagine, she said clearly, simply and beautifully. "Maybe if I learn these things I can change the world".

Change the world. It must be the original childhood dream, the fascinating aspiration of adolescence coupled with the unyielding faith in our own abilities. Eventually, things seem to change, and the practised explanation is that we all grow up. This usually means that we realise that our place in this world is not as grandiose as we had imagined it to be, and we resign ourselves to the reality of our own mundane existences. While children cling on to their fairy tales of utopia, we grow up.

And yet we often lament the very things we have grown up to be. Corruption, apathy, selfishness, social decay, a gnawing tolerance of poverty and malnourishment, discrimination. All the things that were banished from the castles of our childhood dreams now seem to reign in our adult lives. Far from changing the world, it is we who are relegated to slavery, caged in our little micro-societies, watching the world we hoped to change slip away from us.

Such tenuous holds on our dreams are sad enough in our individual lives, but it is in our society as a whole that they have reached the heights of their horrors. There was once a time, at Independence perhaps, when the dreams were not merely of our individual making, but of the whole nation's. That tryst with destiny, whatever we intended it to be, is now just a phrase, it is not real on the streets where our homeless live in absolute squalor, not to be found on in the hearts of ordinary people. If we once cared and swore that we shall build the best nation we ever could, even the memory of that promise is only a thorn today.

Now what?

"The country needs about 545 able administrators who are also willing to represent the government. That's not a lot. I personally feel I have the determination to make a change. But it is irritating that I lack the authority to do so. I am sure there are easily 544 more people thinking along the same lines."

I took that comment from Ramsundar Lakshminarayanan's letter to Rediff a few weeks ago. It is not unusual, I have seem similar refrains on the readers' pages several times; it is routinely found in other congregations of desi-dom as well. At least some of us still try to see in ourselves the power to change things for the better. As the dream fades, we search for ways to cling to it. And we wonder how we might use our skills and abilities without the authority needed to express them fully.

If the question has persisted through the years, then it must be that however clearly we recognised what was needed, not much of it has actually been done. Lack of time, apathy, frustration, whatever be our reasons, our imaginations of a prosperous and vibrant society have remained in the corners of our minds. And through the years, we have continued to pose the question repeatedly without ever arriving at the answers, sometimes lacking even the certainty that the answers can be found at all.

But such pessimism is ultimately self-defeating to any hopes and aspirations we might have, and we must discard it. At the same time, setting this notion aside can hardly pass for an answer, without an alternative. So, here's my take. If you're an armchair nation-builder or a moralising do-gooder in the trenches makes no difference to this assessment, and I offer it not so much as a chapter on finger-wagging lessons on good citizenship, but as a dream. A pipe-dream, some of you are wont to say. Nevertheless ...

At the heart of my solution is a simple premise -- that the war against socio-economic decay is not about minimising evil, it is instead about promoting what is good in each of us.

The anecdotal evidence in support of this is overwhelming, even a brief look at Mother Teresa or Baba Amte's lives will suggest that the very things we cherish in them are the small drops of succour they have added to the ocean of misery. The ocean itself does not appear to have shrunk noticeably or meaningfully from their efforts, but their lives stand out nevertheless. They merely tried to do their parts, the rest is history.

We must find ways to make this position real in our lives. I do not know how each one of us might identify how we can promote the good things we are able to influence. But I do know this -- we have been callously content to merely realise that the system has eroded so far that it is beyond our individual abilities to change it anymore. There may well be significant truth to that, but as a counter to the apathy it has bred, let us remind ourselves that there is another way to look at ourselves. Even as we avoid the battles we cannot win, let us not forget that we cannot win the battles we do not fight.

Let's forget the bad stuff for a while, and work on the good instead. Maybe then, one day, we shall change a little part of our nation for the better. And if nothing comes of our trying, we will have the satisfaction of knowing we tried. It must be enough to know that we act in good faith and with honest intentions, the forms our actions lend themselves to are of much less essence, as are the paths they lead to. Compassion for others, concern for the material and natural environment of our lives, and other markers of nation-building, are ultimately little more than the convictions of our hearts. That must mean that it is enough to want to change the world without knowing how.

Go get 'em, Laura.

Ashwin Mahesh