Let Our Countries Awake!

Where the clear stream of reason has not lost its way 

into the dreary desert sand of dead habit;

Where the mind is led forward by thee into ever-widening thought and action –

Into that heaven of freedom, my Father, let my country awake.

This is an excerpt from the poem Let My Country Awake by the great Rabindranath Tagore and in the light of recent events, there’s nothing more suitable that is to be read by all the citizens of this country. Times are getting tougher every moment and the future holds even worse for us if things head down the same path that they have been following lately. The epitome of God’s creation has seen a grave downfall in the course of their actions and have started to behave like animals in the jungle. This is alarming since we are the only species that was supposed to extend life into a further new meaning and add higher and newer dimensions to the pre-existing definitions of existence and life itself. However, we have turned into scavengers. We feast on what is left behind for us by people at the top of the food chain instead of searching for our own food which we are fully capable of. We have become so dependent on others to guide us through our lives and design an algorithm for us that we can execute without even questioning just like a machine. The degradation of life itself in the present world is such a threat that it will wipe us out long before global warming does! We have lost our sense of question and that in turn will have catastrophic repercussions on the times to come.

We have lost the sense of life as a whole that was passed down to us by our long gone predecessors. We explore the far horizons and want to travel to the future when our present itself is incapable of sustaining itself. We explore the universe and want to find life in outer space while we are still destroying our present home that has sustained life since times unknown. All those creatures that trod the very same grounds that we are, couldn’t do anything to do this planet and here we are, the “epitome of creation” and a bunch of other glorified adjectives that we like to address ourselves with, destroying something so strong that has had the power to uphold and support life since billions of years ago. How ironic! 

Our governments overlook their sense of duty and serve themselves rather than serving the people. Their decisions are based in the mentality of “united they stand, divided they fall”. The driving force behind any government decision is to unite certain people of one particular cult or religion and have them against another group of people of some other caste, creed or religion. And we act as tools for their success since we are so driven mad by the mentality of “me” that the mentality and concepts of “us” make no sense. The higher people thrive on our lack of compassion and love towards others and we become our very own enemies. And the government does all it can to support this animosity. 

This is a place where all the decisions are made to entice our cult or religion against the other and to impede the fostering of love, brotherhood and compassion. Hatred, greed and lust are the driving forces behind every single action that is being taken by each and every human being on this planet. The words love, loyalty and respect have lost their original meanings and are now merely used to get laid or as Instagram and Twitter captions. A place where communal tension is spread and maintained just for the sake of own profits and money making will never prevail in the times to come. A place where crimes as disturbing as murders and rapes take the shape of communal hatred and finger pointing of one religion against the other can never foster a society that can uplift human compassion and facilitate the entire task that we humans were supposed to accomplish. A place where men are driven by lust and women are constantly afraid of their counterparts, a place where people of one cult and religion feel impeded and less important, a place where one gender is constantly afraid of attacks that would put even the Gods to shame, a place where one religion feels less privileged and more attacked than others will never be at peace. We act as media for the propagation of hate and anger against people who are no different than us. They are the victims of the same socio-political structure that we have suffered from and are kept in the same dark room that we currently reside in. And the people who rule us make sure that the room stays dark enough for us to not see each other! 

We want to inhabit other planets and we have the audacity to say that we will send human life on Earth elsewhere in space. This entire plan is going to fail miserably. When we are not able to save life on our own planet, what makes us think that we could do the same on other planets? We will introduce the same shortcomings that we have fostered and ignored, these shortcomings that are foreign concepts to the outer space will contaminate life outside of planet Earth. If our predecessors watched us do this to our home, believe me, they wouldn’t have invented the wheel. If life is to be transferred elsewhere, a lot of thoughts have to be instilled in it that it already lacks. Without this there’s no point taking a step further in this direction, since one destroyed planet should be enough for us to put us to shame.