A letter

This is a letter I wrote to the author of an article.

Sajith,
It has been a great pleasure to read your article that was published in Hindu on 2nd of January. It is rare to find someone questioning the system of which he/she has been a beneficiary. No doubt, it would have taken great courage from your part. So please accept my congratulations.

A few years ago, one of the greatest question that raged in our campus was ‘Should campus politics be banned?’. They had valid reasons of frequent strikes, lockouts, bloodsheds, goondas, hooliganisms, etc. Today student politics has disappeared from most of our campuses. But what has it been replaced with? A bunch of kids who fear to question the corrupt educational system.
Slowly the government and administrative machinery has been reserved for the scrupulous of the society. What we see in the place of politics is ‘anarchy’. The bulk among the population chooses silence and the simple ideology-‘Happy as long as well fed’.

The art of questioning has disappeared from our way of life. 10 sedition cases has been booked in India for the year 2010. The sedition law was brought on by British to counter the freedom movement. The irony is the same free India today uses the law more vigorously than the British. The bottom line is ‘You are free to corrupt the system, but do not question it.’

The ethnic culture has disappeared from the countryside. It has migrated to our TV screens and city stage shows. Today Kathakali is a face painted in bright green, doing a couple of mudras. The Theyyam is a reddish devil with fake boobs. Ayurvedic treatment is a western lady being massaged by an Indian. Religion has forsaken ‘the way of salvation’. Today they prefer money laundering to salvation. But we don’t really bother to notice, do we?

You mentioned ‘the unhappy IT kids’. Will they choose to throw away the job that pays them well? May be not, because we fear a day when we cannot afford our hotel bills, petrol, clothes, movies. In short that is ultimate motivation- FEAR.