“What kind of generation is going to be handling the world a decade from now?”
This question is being asked by many. There are reasons for the concern. Campuses to metro stations and family dining tables, young people sit glued to their smart phones or laptops. For the most part they do not hang out with peer groups or enjoy friendly banter with friends or cousins. Our institutes of higher learning are making the brighter ones more and more over-programmed, furious and lonely. They refuse to have old-style intra-family conversations with their parents, grandparents, siblings, aunts, and uncles. Many are obsessed with celebrities from the world of literature, films, the arts and what have you but read little. The only question that has been made to occupy their minds is – ‘how can I be up there?’
Illustration: Pariplab Chakraborty
Have we ever paused to think not what the opinionated young are shutting out but what they are shutting in? Their worries? Their fears? Do they want to know the real world today, do they want to know what truth, justice, and love are? Do they want to know how to love, how to have intimacy without risk?
However much we wish, we can not go back to a world when there was no cyberspace. In Amrit Kaal our democracy magnifies a variety of new global views on truth and justice for our young.
Take the word like ‘encounter’. Matched suitably with images of mobs and blood and men in uniforms, encounter takes a life of its own. It means tunnelling through a bypass and dispensing what is described as ‘quick justice as the common Indian wants it.’ As the news of another encounter somewhere in Uttar Pradesh or Maharashtra goes viral, bloodied images of a don shot in the court premises by “person or persons unknown” begin doing the rounds along with clapping crowds feeding sweets to each other. This demolishes justice and obfuscates truth for the generation that is to come next.
The media seems to promote this by asking questions like, ‘Why should the overworked and underpaid police obsess over a history sheeter with political links for long? He might use the slow pace of trials in our courts to his advantage. He can engage the best legal minds with devious arguments and also field political backers who need him.’
Then there are those images of bulldozers demolishing the properties of those killed or absconding for fear for their lives. Many watching this ‘off with their heads’ brand of extra-judicial violence are happy at the public diminishing of civilised boundaries of law. The same laws that deny them the pleasure of looting those richer than them.
The viewers are not allowed to pause to hear out the details given out by coroners and witnesses, or respect the majesty of the due process of law. Speedy justice is what the elders in a hurry seem to be spinning around the young.
This view is strengthened when the young see chief ministers of several states use the term ‘encounter’ to threaten those who offend them. “Encounter karwa denge, bulldozer chalwa denge (will do encounters, will drive bulldozers)” are now common threats in electoral rallies that draw claps. Uncles and aunties with their own homes intact, their children safely in schools or abroad will nod in assent. Their more intellectually inclined clones will sit in panels each evening and use weaponised whataboutery to shield their favourite political leaders.
So where is the sense in trying to teach virtues to the young by sending them to schools where chief speakers at convocations or annual meets ask them to be respectful of elders and our non-violent culture from Buddha to Gandhi, to love and protect the nation, to respect the uniform? This is a world where the Char Dham Yatra is being sold to gullible young voters as a cool vacation in the hills that simultaneously cleanse all sins, or at least minimise them.
In this world where we the elders seem to have forgotten how to listen quietly to both sides of arguments, what are the daily reports of students of engineering or business administration or UPSC aspirants dying by suicide, or young executives just dropping dead due to stress, telling us?
That our young or at least the sensitive ones among them must be lonely or scared about the future they face. They are being denied an easy access to justice as truth and nothing but the truth, which in earlier generations was a given. Most of us once upon a time learnt about justice in the context of telling the truth. It necessarily involved a patient hearing given to both parties before a verdict was given. In recent years what is most unsettling is how truth is less and less visible when justice is being blatantly bypassed in favour of a quick verdict “because the public wants it to be so”. And the public, to prove the liars right, will cheer the extra legal gunning down of those our system has failed to bring to justice.
Why should the young believe us after this? For them it is a world of betrayals and excesses alone.
Extreme inequality of wealth and opportunities for the young has fractured organically grown communities in India as we knew them. The segregation of rich kids starts with their private schools, their own gated communities with private guards, water pumps and power back-up plants. The poor remain perennially dependent on governmental bandobast unless they lie, cheat and amass fortunes. The cynical less privileged are useful tools for politicians today for hard selling a neo-morality under which polluting a bunch of holy laddus or hauling meat in an auto can leads to outrage and mob lynching. Led by hired goons looking for trouble with rags around their heads and chanting religious slogans, mobs demand alleged dons be gunned down or those stigmatised by a crowd as having spat in the juice they sell, or a girl sitting pillion on her boyfriend’s motorcycle be ‘taught a lesson for life’.
It is time we stopped teaching our young small values of thrifting, saying namaskar or good morning, wearing polished shoes and pressed school uniforms each day. We must teach the young bigger values – pursuing truth and justice, being part of and cultivating multicultural groups of friends, expanding the public spaces for free debates. They need help to recognise the essential plurality within individuals. Joy in company of people totally unlike you can, we must tell them, multiply itself manifold when you least expect it.
Saakhi is a Sunday column from Mrinal Pande, in which she writes of what she sees and also participates in. That has been her burden to bear ever since she embarked on a life as a journalist, writer, editor, author and as chairperson of Prasar Bharti. Her journey of being a witness-participant continues.
Mrinal Pande is a writer and veteran journalist.
