Hamlet’s hesitation is legion, but he was a shade lucky. The Danish prince of Shakespearean lore at least had a choice, though a difficult one. Does the moderate man, longing for a simple, safe and secure middle path on various issues, macro or micro, confronting him day after day have any hope in these troubled times? Torn between various extremes, be it opinions or actions, he would be hard pressed just to retain his sanity, let alone having his way or even say. What is the truth and what to do?: Indeed, such dilemmas stalk every walk of an Indian’s life, from culture to commerce.
The info boom and the surfeit of views of any and every media, have combined only to confound and confuse one’s mind, instead of offering clarity. To get through the maze and emerge unscathed mentally is an onerous task. That knowledge does not necessarily lead to wisdom is a cliched canon, but today what you know may actually trip you into an abyss of ignorance and wrong doing. Individual reasoning, independent thinking and self-analysis in solitude often get blown off by borrowed opinions and a barrage of visuals, so much so that it is a dilemma that dwells in the end. And often, dithering is worse than a wrong decision, unless you are a P V Narasimha Rao, who made a career out of procrastination!
And decision delayed may be decision denied. For, in these politicised times when immoral people are in the race for the high moral ground, all vital issues are invariably hijacked by the bad and the ugly, leaving the good high, dry and shy! Take for instance the fun and furore alike, over Valentine’s day. The day has doubtless degenerated into an occasion for open solicitation of, and by, impressionable youth, egged by commercial vested interests and a mindless media. Such vulgar, voluble and visible mating and dating is a western fad, that ill fits a country like India where parents still dote on even grown up children. But can their concerns and outrage be boldly exhibited except at the risk of being branded along with the likes of Senas and the PMK who took to the streets, voicing very much the same concerns but through rank indecent display? The moderates are thus rendered mute while their legitimate apprehensions linger!
But such cultural confusions were not just confined to Valentine. Similar scenes were enacted when Khushboo spilt her pearls of wisdom on some lofty moral themes. With such callous celebrities, sensation-prone media and a broom-wielding brigade fighting it out with reckless abandon, rotten eggs and raucous rhetoric, where was the place for any normal talk? But then, is middle class India, propelled by western mores and aided by booming incomes, really queuing up to lose its virginity in droves? Are such moral aberrations a national trend, as the media has made it out to be? And don’t we have evidence and arguments to counter that instead of brooms and tomatoes? But to the dicey dilemma: What should a prospective bride or groom expect of a would-be lifemate? To be on the side of traditional morality or opt for free-wheeling modernity, particularly when the two are seemingly in conflict?
Whether man is a political animal or not, he surely is a religious animal. Faith is at the core of every human being; to deny or even suppress it would be hypocrisy. But that precisely is what Indians are exhorted to do by their secular guardians. And this when elsewhere in the world, that we are often told, and tend, to emulate, the trend is towards the ‘Right’, as they call it. The Danish cartoons, published in un-Hamletian style without dithering, the violent Islamic reaction to it, born-again Bush’s refusal to visit Mahatma Gandhi’s samadhi, coming as it does after the Saudi king’s similar ‘gesture’, in utter disregard of India’s protocol, the Pope’s pompous call to all European Muslims to convert to Christianity after concluding that Islam cannot be reformed, the shared hatred between Muslims and Jews, European blasphemy laws that protect only the dominant faith …yes, the world and its leaders are primarily driven by religious convictions, particularly in the context of rising Islamic terror. But the great Indian dilemma: Now where do we draw the secular lakshman rekha and how does secular India secure itself? Should India too take guard like the rest of the world and commit secular sin, albeit in self-interest? Or, should our secularism continue to provide for innocent civilians to be bombed out by indoctrinated jihadists? A dangerous dilemma indeed!
Now over to the corruption conundrum. Back scratching is a national malaise, not wrought by mosquito bites alone but by a different kind of itch too. Though scandals cause public anger, the outrage is rarely sustained. This is because corruption has become an accepted and pervading fact of life. Since even the average citizen routinely indulges in it, be it just a petty act, he is inhibited from taking it up as a major moral issue. Reason why he feigns outrage in public even while winking at it in private. But what a self-defeating dilemma!
Dilemmas dog the international arena too. Europe is bogged down by the dilemma between free speech and respect for religious sentiments. The US that ‘promotes’ democracy all over the world through bombs now faces a boomerang: Islamic countries are enthusiastically electing classified terrorist outfits to power! Globalisation is backfiring on its western champions: An Indian-born industrialist, LN Mittal is set to take over a steel behemoth in Europe but die-hard proponents of free trade and capitalism there are now invoking nationalism to thwart the bid! For us Indians, that last one is a delightful dilemma!
Well, it appears, the world over too many people in a dilemma are falling between the stools!
e-mail the writer at [email protected]