On this website, I'm not selling something that requires you to pay; instead, I’m here to explore an opportunity to air various issues with you on which you and I as concerned individuals could meet because they just might be very dear to us. There are many infuriating things we are constantly required to endure; I wish I knew how to solve them all, where to begin, how to approach, and how to proceed. But I simply don’t. I’m hoping that perhaps through common understanding, empathy, respect and awareness for the world that we live in and on which we all have a significant stake we could raise these issues, discuss and figure out how to advance with them to our common advantage. Our ideas, if they naturally resonate without any fiat of any kind demanding attention that they deserve, may ultimately provide the impetus to explore what we need to do as a society now and how we should as one unfragmented entity proceed.
We are not launching another political party; we have already too many. Regardless of our individual alignment to polity, I think there are some issues on which we could significantly converge taking common steps together. This is the basis to project and capture the common denominator of our assertions, our understanding, our hope, our outrage and our thoughts on a world that we share with each other with an ardent hope that in some ways we can make the difference we desire.
Right now, I'm in the process of developing this site which is far from being complete. I thank you for your patience and tenacity to read up to this without losing your curiosity.
Your's truly, Saumen Sengupta
| Our Worst problem: | Our lack of awareness |
We are not aware about our own
world. Consequently, we live in a world often shaped and influenced by others.
We live in a world where our own input is significantly less than all the others
we interact with. We live in opinions, what other significant ones do tend to
claim are more important than our own examined position. We, thus, exist through
reactions. Thus, if others around us are violent, petty, and shallow, we, in
turn, let them shape us precisely in that way. As a result, we become violent,
petty and shallow. If we could only be masters of our own selves, if we could be
thoughtful, self-enquiring, challenging, demanding more than what our own
mediocrity suggests, perhaps, we could all live differently. Instead of being
guided, we could probably pen our own history discovering ourselves at each step
anew.
So long as we remain "unaware" we'd be part of the "herd", part of
the "collective". To be an individual, to be "serious", we must be able to
question and challenge our collective wisdom, challenge our pet positions, our
dogmas, our own nurtured beliefs. Only when we have the capacity to question
ourselves, capacity to question our vested interest that meets the world as our
'traditions' could we be aware; only then we are truly attentive to the world
that we share with each other.
Becasue we are not aware and we do not
realize the importance of awareness as a social force, we have no stake in
shaping our societal checks and balances; we are told what to do, but our voices
are never heard. There is no feedback system that could capture the actual
dynamics or dialectics observed at the grass-root level to present it at a
global level. Our leaders decide what we should think! We are imbued in a
Faustian design continuously selling ourselves to our highest bidders. That's
why we are in a 'collective' as long as we remain unaware. Sure, we do complain
every now and then, but our complaints have no momentum. Because we are unaware,
our complaints and criticisms about our environment, about our government, about
our polity, about everything are like those emanating from a prisoner whose sole
interest is to improve the prison condition.
Must we continue in
our own custom-designed prison?
| Our profound neglect: | Our continuing interest in gender, caste and race-based discriminations |
In our bourgeois framework, maintained and
endorsed by the all powerful patriarchal society, gender,caste and race continue
to haunt us even in this century. Education is sought-after quality for our
urban high-caste men, but the same is not considered necessary for our female
counterparts, for our dalit childfren, for our adibasis. Oh yes, some education
is good for them, but let that be controlled and dished out by the high-caste
patriarchal society ordained some two thousand years ago by Manu. Let men in the
upper echelon decide, our world mostly asserts, what is good for women, for the
underdog, for the have-nots and what they should strive for. Secondly, if one is
not from the main stream with “proper” caste and/or proper “tribe” tag, one
could easily say goodbye to “education”. Oh yes, there are quotas for OBC
category to gain admissions in our presitgious institutes and governament
operational entities, but would that keep me alive if I'm refused drinking water
in my village or if my house is burnt down because my "uppity" behavior could
not be tolerated at some level of my society!
About some hundred years
back, Swami Vivekananda observed that a nation that treated her women folks as
chattel had practically no chance to survive even in a secular setting. “A bird
cannot ever fly on one wing much as it tries”, bitterly observed SV. See how
this challenge is enthusiastically taken up in its entirety by a group of
dedicated sanyasinis, the paribrajikas of Sri Ramakrishna Saradapeeth Kanya
Gurukul situated in Jhargram, West Medinapur. If humanity is truly one
existence, shouldn't we relentlessly question how and why we do live like a
bunch of islands? Can we truly live like islands screaming "Me first!" all the
time? Isn't it high time to be truly aware of what it means when we sing "WE ARE
THE WORLD"? Do we realize the responsibility it confers on us?
Must we live as fragmented beings when we are only ONE?
| Our Worst crime: | Killing others to promote and sustain ideas |
Life is the most precious of all, most sacred of
all and yet we don't mind to eliminate others via ethnic cleansing, via suicide
bombing, via acts of terrorism, via our intentional neglect. This century and
the last one are marked with violence unleashed to promote specific ideas. My
"ism" is better than your "ism", my religion is better than your religion, my
country is better than you country. Within this time, we have fostered and
nurtured nationalism, fascism, and fundamentalism. As a result we have all kind
of fundamentalists among us spreading like a deadly virus.
How do we eradicate violence and terrorism from our midst? With more violence and
terrorism? Has any one ever managed to establish a just world by eradicating violence
through more violence? Can violence ever stop violence? It hasn’t and it would never
achieve such a goal either. One might argue that our ideals of “non-violence”, of “truth”
have not been realized either; we still remain the most corrupt and the violent
ones in the world in spite of our wishes. What then went wrong?
The problem is that we have embraced “non-violence”, “Satyameba jayate”, etc. as
ideals to bask under. They are not real to us; they are no more real than the picture of
Swami Vivekananda on our wall collecting soot and dust. Unless we, individually,
discover in our own existence the relevance of “non-violence” as our essence, as our
essential being there is no way we could understand the meaning and import of non-violence
as our being. But instead of discovering them ourselves in terms of our own living, we
pick them up from our society as an established truth, as an ideal, as a mission, as a goal.
And, in doing so, we bury it without slightest guilt.
| Our Worst performance: | Destruction of our environment and ecology |
The rising sea level is
going to swallow, perhaps in our life time, the vast spread of Sundarban at the
mouth of the delta. Within the next 30 years, a good chunk of Bengal would be
under sea-water. The rest of India would soon lose all her glacier-fed rivers.
The poeple will literally die in thirst and hunger as we'd definitely lose our
agriculture through all these. Air quality in Kolkata is so bad that some 75% of
its people are destined to die early through asthma, emphysema, and bronchitis.
A well-known senior minister, when asked for an explanation, had the audacity to
suggest that it was worse in many other countries. But what was worse that we
bought that stupid answer without any hint of intelligence on our part. Why
aren't we outraged? If some 75% of our people are going to die through our
intentional neglect, isn't that outrageous? What are we going to do about it?
Kolkata continues to be filthy, cluttered with garbage, with its public
resources like roads and public parks in rampant disuse. People defecate on
streets and alleyways often in broad daylight. Why can’t we arrange well
maintained public lavatories all across our city for both men and women? Why do
we spit in public places? Why aren’t our drains kept clean and covered? If it is
the job of KMC to keep Kolkata livable, shouldn’t they be answerable to people
when they fail in their mission?
We may be ready to add another 8000
post-secondary Educational Institutions like colleges and universities very
soon, but what about expanding our primary and secondary education for our
millions of children to a respectable level? Aren't we concerned? Don't they
need real education?
| Our false priorities: | What are truly important right now |
We need
a government that is reluctant to lean on excuses and short on slogans. If a
particular department falls short of its stated objectives, people should demand
demotion of the attendant ministers and demotion of the top public servants in
charge of the relevant sectors. We should promote those who can do, who can
deliver. We need a work-force that is capable of working and taking
responsibility. Let us retire those who just cannot do or refuse to do. Let us
investigate those who have amassed a vast fortune via unacceptable and unethical
routes. Let us punish them severely freezing their bank-assets. Government must
be seen accountable to its electorate.
This website is
never going to be finished. We have a long way to go to live healthy without a
constant set of worries and wants. We all need to live our enriched lives in
awareness and understanding without ever losing focus of our priorities and
goals. There is no reason, whatsoever, for living a life of mediocrity
compromising our set of universal values. Talk to your representatives, your
political parties, your business sectors, your schools and colleges, your
municipalities to work with each other focused on their stated objectives to
help us live and grow responsively. Write regularly to newsmedia to discuss all
such issues. Invite your ministers and your local parties to debate these issues
to inform how they are going to solve these problems. Suggest your local clubs
and communities to participate in these issues more effectively.
We need your
vision as valuable input to enrich this site. Tell us, show us how we could be
more meaningful to our very world that is our to design, our to bequeath to our
next generation.