Friday, August 1, 2014

Some respect, some compassion, please!!!

Getting back to writing after a long break is tough. The thought of writing again is easy to come by - that happens every time I see a good article, a blog, a movie or a book that I think is good to write a review about. But the act of peacefully sitting at a comfortable study ambient to thoughts - is a difficult thing to do. More so is to continue writing, and to not get carried away by pastimes that I would right now underrate so as to prove that I am really hooked to writing - pastimes such as playing football (not the American one) or watching Futurama. After a long gap, I made it this time!
Cocoa worker [Image courtesy: www.wikipedia.org]
I came across an article that was about the cocoa farmers in the Ivory Coast. They are the largest producers  of cocoa in the world, and yet chocolates are said to be very very expensive in the Ivory Coast, and hardly available. All of us would love to have a chocolate irrespective of the time of any day. We want the best chocolates, the most expensive food, the most luxurious car - in brief, a luxurious life, or prosperous, as we say when we wish each other. Well, we are not prospering, we are in a downfall. The world has lost its peace and is probably already at a point of no return, and Gaza could be a mirage where we see reflections of near future. The world is metamorphosing - to a hell. We have lost humanity - we care the least about resources - we don't turn off the lights when we don't need them, we litter in public, we destroy public property. We don't care about the people who restore order, and even if we knew, pretend that we don't, and we continue restoring disorder. And then we boast we are social animals - intelligent, politically sound, and future builders. How ironical! A small comfort zone and we are the biggest hedonists, spitting contempt on fellow people whom we call filthy. Man's quest for symbols of his heights and glory are in fact leading him to building his tomb stones. On the other side of every glorified symbol is a dark, sad story of mankind torturing mankind. This article about the preparations in Qatar for the FIFA Football World Cup 2022 is only an example.
My cries for demanding some respect for people who seek some order in life might be lost in the madness of the majority, but the solution is definitely not to stop crying. Neither is it to cry. Have a determination such as that of Howard Roark's, and be collectivistic - hard to get these two traits along, but that's what the day needs from each one of us. 
Whoa! From Ivorian cocoa to collectivism. That was a good connection, I feel accomplished!

47 comments:

  1. ........... and we continue restoring disorder !!!
    Well said Vinu......

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  2. Good to see the silent cry becomes loud and clear.. Well written, Vinu.. Keep writing. As I always, I look forward to see more of your blogs..!

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  3. :( i share your concern too but i probably would not have been able to put it as deftly and concisely as you did. Is collective concern enough though? unless it turns into collective action, what is the point of trying to bring? though helping the coming generation to have a non-misogynistic mindset is surely a good start.

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    1. Athira, thanks! Btw, aren't actions not produced because of our unconcerned, careless, and spoiled way of living? I feel if we have concerns, at least a fraction of that would be turned to actions. And individuals are entities of a society, the building blocks. So every individual concern, decision, and action counts. And such a collective concern is what every individual should be concerned about. That is what every one should try to bring into himself/ herself and others.
      And did you say misogyny because that is what today reflects?

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  4. kollam..... But it is diifficult to achieve collectivism unless individuals are willing to sacrifice the pleasures of today in the hope of a better tomorrow, especially in a society where investments are judged in terms of payback periods......

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    1. Thanks Manish! Yes - the basic problem is that the more the payback period, the more useless the investment is considered to be. Individuals are highly rational - objectives lack the collective rationality. When the needs of today are met at the cost of tomorrow's ability to meet its needs, sustainable development is impossible. Now the difficult question would be whether we should stop being individually rational when nobody else is. Well this is the situation of a "Prisoner's dilemma" - one in which a person never cooperates, assuming that nobody else would, despite the knowledge that mutual cooperation could give a socially best payoff. This is why we jump queues saying everybody does that, we destroy public property saying everybody does that, and nobody cares. The possible solutions could be strict law and order enforcement by governments, which is possible but not being done (rules of not smoking in public places in India exist unimplemented), or spread awareness (which is a slow process but doable because it requires only a small amount of marginal investment, primarily of time, from everybody).

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    2. Collective rationality is impossible to achieve in a system where each individual has a large number of choices. This is the basic law of non-linear systems -- they tend to move towards chaos or disorder. But the question as to whether it is sustainable or not, depends on how one views sustainability since what little we know of the universe suggests a tendency towards higher levels of randomness. By stricter law enforcements, one is simply trying to restrict the degrees of freedom -> the question is, for how long?? We are no longer faced with a world full of people unaware of the working of the universe, but rather a far more purposeful lot with conflicting mind-sets & rigid convictions. Yes, you may convince 10 or 100, but the targets are nowhere close. I feel that it is high time we gave up our linear models of governance & bureaucracy & come up with a non-linear one.

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    3. Non-linearity and chaos is a convincing argument. The current governance models are already non-linear, and that's where the problem is!

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