The Hindu Business Line : Where are the leaders?

Yesterday, a national daily splashed across its front page a well-meaning exhortation to stop day-dreaming about what should be done to improve the condition of our nation and begin doing things to bring about change. As it said: “So let’s stop basking in our glorious past or daydreaming about our great future. Let’s start by dominating today. And domination starts with DO”.

So what does the average citizen — not the type that rubs shoulders with the powers that be and pulls out all the stops necessary to get favours for themselves in whatever field they are engaged in — do? After all, the bulk of the readership of the newspaper concerned (going into millions) hails from the educated middle-class, a section of the population which strains at every sinew to earn a thousand rupees more at the end of the month and, for the most part of it, falls victim to the doings of the “power-mongers”, who will pay crores to those controlling the levers of economic and political power to get their way — and earn ten times the amount they have “invested”.

Making resolutions

To say that the ordinary Indian should work harder in his office, his business or wherever is just to repeat a cliché which has been doing the rounds since August 15, 1948, when the nation celebrated its first anniversary of Independence. We all remember the Independence Day resolutions we made years ago in school, the sincere objective being to live a fuller life as bona fide Indian citizens and, in the process, help make our country even stronger.

But, clearly, looking back we find that nothing much has been achieved by making those resolutions which, make no mistake, were made in good faith but which petered out in the implementation stage no one now remembers why. Or is it that a minuscule proportion of those making the resolutions were indeed successful in carrying them out, but their numbers were so small that they failed to affect the larger picture, so to speak, as time rolled on?

‘Doing’ their bit

Indeed, for the hundreds of millions of ordinary Indians — the real arbiters of the nation’s destiny — to DO is often to get oneself into a right royal mess from which extrication is not only difficult but also at times costly. More often than not, the process ends with problems at the personal level, mostly involving people wielding “power” in society (the local hooligan-strongman and his political and official mentors).

It would, therefore, be downright foolish for the aam admi to begin “doing” his bit for the nation without the backing of those in society whose support could work wonders for the effort put in by him to make his country a better place to live in. Which, in fact, throws light on what the exhortation should have been all about. It would perhaps have been much more meaningful and, of course, implementable if the daily in question had straightaway asked the leaders of Indian society — in every conceivable field — to DO their bit to make the country stronger and healthier.

But where are the leaders who can set an example for the average citizen by DOING what is good for the Republic instead of “simply shrugging our shoulders, blaming our infrastructure, our bureaucracy and our political system”?

RANABIR RAY CHOUDHURY