Better Governance

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.