The Year that was….

Yet another year gone, a new calendar, new resolutions, new beginnings, hopes and aspirations and wishes.

While we welcome the New Year, let us not fear to look back because that is where we are leaving our successes and failures and our biggest lessons.

The year 2019, will be remembered for all the wrong reasons, people lost jobs in fraudulent and mismanaged organisations, many have not got salaries in what they thought was the most secure jobs, lost money where they thought they were the safest, lost lives protesting for what they thought was their fundamental right and lost faith in the leadership that they had brought in with such hopes and aspirations.

We continue to live in contradicting times - environment vs development, democracy vs. oligarchy, rationality vs religion, lives of animals vs that of humans, and I guess one can go on. However, probably the worst of the contradiction is that of generation and its differences.

While the idea of generation-gap is not new and the fact that two generations have never thought alike; what is significant is that two generations have never differed so violently, with the younger generation taking the blow badly. Lord Tennyson, must be ashamed to see that the ‘old order is not changeth, not yielding place to new’!

As a nation we are today a combination of manav and danav. Some are epitomes of humanity and we can still some living examples of them, but unfortunately we can also see the danav’s in their full nakedness. It is said this is prakriti, nature which is a blend of both. Life is all about striking a balance. But as a law-abiding citizen, the layman seems to be having law against it, and the upholders of law, seem to have made a slave out of the blind-folded lady. So what should the mere mortals like you and me do? Wait for Lord Vishnu to don the Kalki avatar or be one himself/herself? 

What if Lord Vishnu is in his cosmic slumber?

It is said – that god helps them who help themselves, and that is the truth behind the delay in Vishnu’s Kalki avatar. We have not done enough for Him to feel that we have done our bit. If as a nation we resolve to do our bit, we might not even need Kalki, the danav’s, asura’s, and the rakshasha’s of our nation will meet their end anyways. This is the time for the might of the mortal. So wake up O Indian and take your rightful place in the limelight. Don’t let any botched hand take away this right of yours. If we do our bit, I am sure as the noted lyricist Sahir Ludhianvi has said – ‘Woh subaah kabhi to aayegi, ….’

Finally to rephrase Tagore’s words from ‘Where the mind is without fear’ –

Where the clear stream of reason has not lost it's way

into the quicksand of fascist forces,

Where the mind is led forward by thee

into ever-widening thought and action.

In to that heaven of rationality and freedom, my  father,

LET MY YOUTH LIVE!”

Friends Wo subaah aa gayee!

This is 2020, Lord Vishnu is not coming! He has left it for you and me.

Let us resolve to take our country to new horizons and march with our youth, I think they are showing us the way this time!

HT Mint dt. 01/01/2020

Let us make this New Year, happy!!