Window Seat | Mrinal Chatterjee | 27.12.2020
Bye 2020
The year 2020 has been a year, we would like to erase from our memory.
But ironically this is one year which will remain in public memory for ages.
 |
| Cartoon by Mrityunjay |
Never before in our living memory, we faced such a pandemic which
triggered a world-wide health crisis inflicting untold misery to millions. In
India the harsh lock-down imposed to ensure that people stay indoors to curb
the spread of virus impacted tens of thousands of migrant labourer. It triggered
the worst mass migration after the independence. Economy, already sliding
downwards even before the pandemic arrived in India nose dived. With schools
and colleges closed, millions of children, especially from disadvantaged class-
remained without formal education. Online teaching and learning became the new
normal. Coming to the ‘new normal’, a
word coined in 2007 in relation to the financial crisis, which became familiar
during pandemic- wearing mask became the new normal. Photographs of brides and
grooms getting married both wearing masks appeared quite frequently in
newspapers. The big fat Indian wedding saw a drastic slimming down. The
temples, mosques, churches and gurudwaras remained closed. Hospitals worked
overtime.
Along with the pandemic, the death of film star Sushant Singh Rajput, drug menace in Bollywood, Kangna
Ranawat and Arnab Goswami vrs Maharastra Government episodes and laws relating
to ‘love jihad’ hogged the headlines.
Several policies including New Education Policy were announced.
The year-end saw one of the biggest farmer agitations in independent
India. And a new strain of Corona virus was detected in Great Britain.
Hopefully the new year will bring some much needed good news.
Clean India
Visiting
the Banaras Hindu University on February 4, 1916, Mahatma Gandhi in his address
said: “I visited the Vishvanath temple last evening. If a stranger dropped from
above on to this great temple, would he not be justified in condemning us? Is
it right that the lanes of our sacred temples should be as dirty as they are?
If even our temples are not models of cleanliness, what can our self-
government be? We do not know elementary laws of cleanliness. We spit
everywhere. The result is indescribable filth.”
After 104 years and 11 months the situation has remained more or less
the same. The “Economic Times”
recently published a story headlined “India alarmingly filthy even by standards
of poor countries”. Nobody living in India except some well kept pockets and
states like Sikkim in India, can deny it. Most of our lakes and rivers are
severely poisoned with urban and chemical effluents. The air in most of the
cities, particularly in North India is polluted well beyond the severe level
prescribed. Men can be seen all over the country peeing on walls or into the
air. It is almost impossible to find any pavements in our towns and cities, and
when there are some, they are strewn with trash and wet with urine.
It is now quite apparent that six years after the Prime Minister
announced the Swachch Bharat Abhiyan with much fanfare, and hundreds of crores
spent, it is apparent that we cannot
clean up the rotting trash that has become so common on our streets all over
the country.
The Prime Minister must be lauded for flagging this as a
priority. His ambitions were huge. Besides promising millions of public
toilets, he also promised to build one hundred smart cities with 24X7 drinking
water, zero garbage disposal and total solid waste management with full-scale
drainage and sewerage systems.
Though smart cities did not materialise, many public toilets
were built. But most of the toilets remained unusable, because nobody
maintained it.
As
senior journalist and social analyst said, “We now have a highly centralized
system more suitable to governing India than serving India. The structure of
our public administration with its preponderance at the national and state
capitals and with a tiny fraction left to interface with citizens at a local
level, and even these not being answerable to citizens is at the root of our
inability to transform this country.”
No
rural area in India has any worthwhile local government. For that matter nor
does any city or town in India have a truly independent municipal
administration autonomous of the state governments. It is as if the common
people have lost control over their lives and are now victims of the whims and
fancies of distant masters. We must think why the government fails to deliver
services in India. Only then a real Swachh Bharat could be made.
How Social Media is changing language and literature?
Every medium and communication technology impacts language and it in turn
impacts literature. Telegraph invented in 1792 changed the way news used to be
written. Telephone invented in 1890 changed the way we used to converse. Radio
(invented in 1891) and television (invented in 1920s) have had profound impact
on the way we engage with language and this in turn impacted language.
Social media which came in popular use in 1990s and in about twenty
years had half of the world population as active users, also have the same effect.
It gave rise to a mixed language which also included emoticons. The language purists are not happy about it.
They rue the loss of the sanctity of the language and grammar. It introduced
new vocabulary and altered the use of several words and expressions. It
increased the speed and volume of communications. It created new forms of
literature. However, the long and languid pace of literature has been the
causality.
Tailpiece: Benevolent Ghosts
A donkey was tied to a tree. One night a ghost cut the rope and released the donkey.
The donkey went and destroyed the crops in a farmer's land. Infuriated, the farmer's wife shot the donkey and killed it.
The donkey's owner was devastated at the loss. In reply, he shot dead the farmer's wife.
Angered by his wife's death, the farmer took a sickle and killed the donkey's owner.
The wife of the donkey's owner got so angry that she and her sons set the farmer's house on fire.
The farmer, looking at his house turned into ashes, went ahead and killed both the wife and children of that donkey's owner.
Finally, when the farmer was full of regret, he asked the ghost as to why did it kill them all?
The ghost replied, "I killed nobody. I just released a donkey that was tied to a rope. It is all of you who released the devil within you which resulted into everything bad that happened."
Today a section of the media has become like the ghost. It keeps releasing donkeys on a daily basis. And people react and argue with each other, hurt each other, without even having a second thought.
In the end, the media dodges all responsibilities. So, it's our responsibility to not to react on every donkey released by media and preserve our relationship with our friends and relatives.
(Source: A WhatsApp forward)
***
Journalist
turned media academician Mrinal Chatterjee lives in Dhenkanal, Odisha. Odia
translation of an anthology of essays titled Mahatma Gandhi: Journalist and
Editor, originally published in English is releasing in early January 2021.
mrinalchatterjeeiimc@gmail.com
***
No comments:
Post a Comment