Monday, February 28, 2011
Tuesday, February 22, 2011
Saturday, February 5, 2011
Happy Idiots*
“It’s a great era to be born in” someone mentioned to me whilst sipping on a glass of wine and blowing plumes of smoke in every direction. I couldn’t help but grimace. Is it really true then, are we really lucky? This individual with radically utopian views continued “Particuarly for women, there is so much we can do.” Can we really?
The complacency that has come to surround the middle class, upper middle class and the nouveau rich is deeply rooted in a sense of narcissistic myopia, hedonistic, lifestyles and wielding of horse blinders against the gruesome reality of the world. Of course we are not bidding goodbyes to chunk of our male population and sending them off to fights world wars, or living in mortal fear of civilian bombings everyday. But that is just you and I. The reality is grimmer in many parts of the world. New poverty estimates published by the World Bank reveal that 1.4 billion people in the developing world (one in four) were living on less than US$1.25 a day in 2005 (www.econ.worldbank.org). Can we even relate to how these people sleep in extreme cold or heat, do we ever think of them when we take for granted the bed that we have, the roof and walls that give us our cherished “privacy”? Is it all right to live in this state of denial? Is it acceptable to generalize the excesses bestowed upon us to the rest of humanity?
For women, there is no room to dance in sheer abandon celebrating the liberalized era, yet. With rampant Female Genital Mutilation (FGM) in many parts of the world (according to a 2010 WHO fact sheet it is that estimated 100 to 140 million girls and women worldwide are currently living with the consequences of FGM. http://www.who.int/mediacentre/factsheets/fs241/en/), denial of basic human rights and imposition of restrictions which most women in the western world take for granted, the lacuna is perhaps even more pronounced. The factual position presented here is intended as a mere representation of the reality, and it is necessary to make our existing worldviews more coherent with the reality.
There might not be world-war looming ahead or a genocide to threaten our very existence, but the bi-product of the capitalist culture that dominates the world these days- the growing chasm of between the rich and the poor in some countries and the extremism of other forms of governance in others that leads to blatant denial of human rights to many, is something that our frugal human spirit trapped within the comfort of our bourgeois lifestyle need to acknowledge. We face the risk of becoming ketamine induced individuals where thought of people dying of hunger written off as “depressing” and prompt a quick redressal by means of deep conversations about the people that have the best sense of humour. Are we becoming more superficial and exponentially shallower? Are we at the risk of becoming happy idiots? I think you already know my answer.
I do not wish to offer a deterministic view here, however urge a sincere thought as to why the increased complacency of our comfortable life has numbed us so. Action on our part, though important, is a secondary issue at this point. Getting out of the cocoon that impairs our objective vision and worldview through its faux fur lining is the new social imperative.
* Thanks to Ms. Y. Shymko for sharing this phrase, who claims the genesis of this phrase rests with Professor D. Allen.
The complacency that has come to surround the middle class, upper middle class and the nouveau rich is deeply rooted in a sense of narcissistic myopia, hedonistic, lifestyles and wielding of horse blinders against the gruesome reality of the world. Of course we are not bidding goodbyes to chunk of our male population and sending them off to fights world wars, or living in mortal fear of civilian bombings everyday. But that is just you and I. The reality is grimmer in many parts of the world. New poverty estimates published by the World Bank reveal that 1.4 billion people in the developing world (one in four) were living on less than US$1.25 a day in 2005 (www.econ.worldbank.org). Can we even relate to how these people sleep in extreme cold or heat, do we ever think of them when we take for granted the bed that we have, the roof and walls that give us our cherished “privacy”? Is it all right to live in this state of denial? Is it acceptable to generalize the excesses bestowed upon us to the rest of humanity?
For women, there is no room to dance in sheer abandon celebrating the liberalized era, yet. With rampant Female Genital Mutilation (FGM) in many parts of the world (according to a 2010 WHO fact sheet it is that estimated 100 to 140 million girls and women worldwide are currently living with the consequences of FGM. http://www.who.int/mediacentre/factsheets/fs241/en/), denial of basic human rights and imposition of restrictions which most women in the western world take for granted, the lacuna is perhaps even more pronounced. The factual position presented here is intended as a mere representation of the reality, and it is necessary to make our existing worldviews more coherent with the reality.
There might not be world-war looming ahead or a genocide to threaten our very existence, but the bi-product of the capitalist culture that dominates the world these days- the growing chasm of between the rich and the poor in some countries and the extremism of other forms of governance in others that leads to blatant denial of human rights to many, is something that our frugal human spirit trapped within the comfort of our bourgeois lifestyle need to acknowledge. We face the risk of becoming ketamine induced individuals where thought of people dying of hunger written off as “depressing” and prompt a quick redressal by means of deep conversations about the people that have the best sense of humour. Are we becoming more superficial and exponentially shallower? Are we at the risk of becoming happy idiots? I think you already know my answer.
I do not wish to offer a deterministic view here, however urge a sincere thought as to why the increased complacency of our comfortable life has numbed us so. Action on our part, though important, is a secondary issue at this point. Getting out of the cocoon that impairs our objective vision and worldview through its faux fur lining is the new social imperative.
* Thanks to Ms. Y. Shymko for sharing this phrase, who claims the genesis of this phrase rests with Professor D. Allen.
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