How
to make India better, how to make the United Nations better, how to make
governance better, how to be a better parent, child, teacher, student – worthy as
those concepts are, they miss the well intentioned point. The simple (okay- simple and easy don't mean the same thing, yeah?) one-stroke
solution to the aforementioned Gordian knots would be for each of us, as,
individuals, social individuals, to wonder how we are doing on the homo sapience-y
scale; whether the self is in balance with the awareness.
Self
is, uh, self-evident.
Awareness,
okay, yeah, here’s where things start to get messy. For instance, I was just
apprised of a couple of young women physically assaulted, in consecutive
incidents, for having the courage to defy an upper-caste
(my fingers feel slimy as I type those words) khap panchayat ruling of exile
imposed on their family for being kin to arrested, tried, and convicted felons.
The beatings administered for non-compliance with the exile orders, to wit, arrogantly
continuing their pursuit of education, which, by the bye, the young women were
doing by trekking long rural distances and then doing well in their studies.
And there you have it; an instance of selves and their degrees of awareness. On one side an inner directed collective of
selves and their awareness, on the other a more educated sense of self and its
place in the larger scheme of things. Are those Young Women better persons? Is
the upper (yuck) caste (even more yuck) behavior closer to the animal in man,
somewhat lower on the whole personhood scale? Yes and yes. Will the Young Women
make better governors of a multi cultural, many-self world? Hell yes. The khap
panchayat selves? Uh, D’oh.
Oh,
and mention needs to be made about the personhood of the husbands of the Young
Women, who abandoned their wives on imposition of the exile. Way to go guys; so
much for the holy vows you took to protect and honor your, no doubt, underage
brides. I’m sure god will understand.
