16 Years Those Have Been...

Today is the 4th of September, 2009. I am sixteen today! I am an adult from today according to the laws of most of the countries and provinces of the world!

In these sixteen years I have seen many things around me. Mostly changes. From talks on a regular fixed telephone earpiece to VoIP calls, from two-storey buildings to the same being demolished to build sky-touching scrapers, from buying vegetables and fruits from the vendors who sit on the roads to visiting malls and hypermarkets just to buy our daily grocery, from days when 40MB hard disks were considered as a luxury to days when even hard disks which hold terabytes of data is not enough, from days when the definition of study was obtaining knowledge to when it means just trying to obtain marks in every possible way, from days when people would co-operate with each other to when we have developed a sort of crab mentality and from times when human beings valued time to days when they try to turn every minute into value.

The changes taking place are vast, quick, endless and above all considered necessary. Just deemed to be necessary.

Are these changes a need? Or are they wants of a person, company, organization, or a country?

This is what I think. The necessity of change, in my opinion, has come up every now and then just because of human nature and qualities of envy and jealousy. And, then naming them to be a part of the ‘competitive’ world.

I think more than the changes that have occurred in these unnecessary fields—where it would have done without such radical changes in all these fields—we need changes in the more prevalent and dominant parts of our beliefs and value systems that confine us from developing as individuals and the society on the whole.

There are many such myths that have been busted in the past, but, a lot of work still remains to be done. Since, we are hypocrites. We say that the other person should not have done something in this fashion, but when we do the same, we try to justify the same by giving excuses.

The current President of the U. S. of A, Barack Obama, had his presidential campaign on similar lines and that’s when I began thinking, ‘When will the Indian society wake up?’ It has been sixty-two years since India has got its independence and have we been able to transform India into a nation which everyone would want to live in? Or do we need more than four hundred years (like America did) to realize that we need to change and live with a feeling of acceptance?

We need to bring the humanoid change which is more necessary than similar aspects of materialism. We need to be open to accept that beliefs that are a part of the tradition since thousands of years may not necessarily be true. And approve of the fact that even if they were true at that time, they might need the change as per the needs of the society today. We have to decide if we are going to live within the bondage that most of our ancestors have or are we going to change and adapt into the feelings that make us humans.

We need to build the society we wish to live in. We can’t bank upon others to make a castle we wish to live in. And even if we do, we won’t like it until we customize it to our needs. Similarly, we need to get into the system to change it.

You may think that I am a cynic or a critic. But, the fact remains that we need to first understand the problems we are facing before even thinking of ways in which they can be solved. And so, I am trying to understand the problems in these formative years of my life so that I can do all that I can with all my might to make ‘My India’ the one of my dreams, to reform it in every possible way when I can have all the resources at my own disposal (in short, as soon as I begin with my first job after my graduation). At the very least, I hope I would be able to dedicate a few years from my life to this very need of my country, Change.

Signing off...