Has ignorance become a choice?

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India is a young nation. And it has at least 10 million ‘affluent young Indians’ – young Indians born into money, and with hardly any familial pressure; financial, social or emotional. It is safe to assume that at least half of the said numbers are educated, carry smart looking and smartly interfaced phones, and network with great ease – the creamy Indian layer that has the dough, knows how to have fun, embraces the flattening of the globe and appreciates the sophistication this adds to their lifestyles.

This is not a meager number, and it should be an asset for any country to have these many young people who have the means, an education, and lots of exposure. These people could champion Indian society into one that is fair, and play a significant role in reducing the absurdly inhuman difference between those at the top and bottom rungs of the social and economic ladders.

However, I fear that this is not to be. The notion of India having a lot of youngsters – youngsters who are educated, confident and willing to actively participate in ushering in change – increasingly looks like a false dawn. Sure, there were the Jan-Lokpal protests that saw a lot of participation, and the candle-light parades towards city-centers have become a fashionable means to show irritation and dissatisfaction. Nice as this is, the participation seems to be coming only in those societal contexts that concern middle-class and upper middle-class Indians.

Why does the rich, urbane youngster not seem to empathize with more widespread issues – those that affect the vast majority, the ones that cannot be overstated by metaphors; the ones that shamefully reflect the Indian reality; those that are too stark, too twisted even, to have simplified solutions? The rhetoric might arise out of sentimentality, but the need for redress is steeply embedded in practicality – The sustenance of a healthy, non-violent Indian society is dependent on whether India can really grow inclusively; and involve people from across the spectrum in the ‘Indian growth story’.

The answer may lie in not being able to understand the environment that we inhabit. There seems to be a general mindset amongst us youngsters that all of India’s problems are the fruits of rabid and chronic corruption across the ‘system’; and that there is nothing they could possibly do that would change anything at any level. Granted that corruption is a major ill, but there are a lot of other barricades that make India what it is; and there cannot be any real contribution from people unless they try and make an effort at understanding what these concerns are. The first principle of deliverance is knowledge.

At an earlier time, it would have been valid to shift the entire blame for this seeming nonchalance to a lack of access to ‘real’ information. The mainstream media – this refrain has been done to death – does not care enough to research and report unglamorous news, and in this bid, fails to keep the average Indian reader appraised of what really is happening on the ground, what policies have been formulated, how these policies have been implemented, and how these policies have actually fared. With the advent of Facebook, Twitter, Online media, Blogging and sundry other mechanisms for global networking, it is not only foolish, but also grossly irresponsible, to just blame the newspapers and news channels for our ignorance.

In the last decade, numerous books have been written about contemporary India, by authors Indian and foreign, and in many moods and shades – some are about the astonishing change India has witnessed in the last twenty years, some talk about Indian cities as a reflection of India and Indians in the current, and some have explored the changing dynamics in Indian villages due to the globalizing nature of the Indian economy. This is not to say that each of these accounts presents a true, unhindered picture; but a conjugation of varied sources would help place things in perspective and balance the contradictions in perception. Accepted, not everybody has the inclination to read, but then there are a myriad other sources. There are YouTube videos of incidents, seminars, conferences and interviews by rural journalists, industrialists, policy-makers and academicians that highlight such issues and focus on the solutions, or the lack thereof, to address the difficulties.

One has to only talk to people from outside of their conventional social groups to get a grip on differences in life in different surroundings, the agencies that make them so, and even what needs be done to correct the anomalies. No expert can be as incisive as the slum-dwellers themselves in pointing out where slums stand in modern city life, whether they can be done without, and about why government projects at displacing them have been so abjectly unsuccessful. No rural journalist, policy-maker or economist can tell you better than the villagers what Yojanas the villages really need, what the major glitches in the present developmental plans are, and where the implementation gap comes from.

And when one taps information from one or more of these sources, there is realization that there are other stumbling blocks that pose difficulties as intense as corruption itself. For example, the Indian diversity that we so compulsively glorify makes it extremely difficult to standardize policies, or have uniform reforms across the nation, and hence may not be as amazing a thing as many of us Indians think it to be. The License Raj might have opened up at the corporate end of governance, but is still closed in the operations end, and this makes law enforcement very cumbrous. But then, there are acute logistical problems in trying to open up operational procedures.

These points of crisis are extraneous of corruption, but the average well-to-do Indian knows hardly enough about the nature of these questions. It is hardly justifiable to expect any significant action from this privileged class if they are in the dark about these points of departure. These people can be the agents of relevant technological developments, economic changes, entrepreneurial initiatives and a shift in outlook; but only after they understand what is needed and how.

Hence the question begs. Has Ignorance become a choice? Why is it that we cannot put in the time or the effort to understand relevant socio-economic complexities? Is it too much to ask in today’s fast paced and extremely competitive lifestyles, or are we just indifferent, and don’t care a damn after all?