Once upon a time whenever anything went wrong, people blamed it upon the God’s wrath. Failed crop, God’s punishment. Attack of sickness, God’s punishment, an untimely death, God calling the beloved to his bosom.
While God’s will continued to hold sway, the wrath of other powers gained in precedence with time.
Our various castes rulers won over the claim of blame. They bathed in blood, they slept on gold, and most of them rightfully earned the blame of being the cause behind all misery.
Then came the Britishers, ready to do all they can to earn that blame. And they did quite a fair job at it too.
And when they were pushed away, the System rose up to claim responsibility. Whatever went wrong, it was the fault of the system. A kid failed – fault of the education system. A bus was missed, fault of the transport system. ‘Poora system hi kharab hai’ became the cry of one and all and gave a very easy and convenient reason for everything that went wrong.
Then, our neighbours rose up to share some of the responsibility and cry turned to ‘Bahari Haath.’ Everything that could be claimed to be influenced by foreign powers shouted and screamed of having been influenced so. Whenever things went too tough for the system, the ‘foreign hand’ rose up most amiably to claim some of the attention for itself. And we cheerfully gave it all our attention and lived in bliss of being the helpless sufferers cursed with bad neighbours.
But now, times have changed. We don’t so much blame the foreign hand now. It has become more fashionable to blame the ‘hand’ instead. And our own politicians have very dutifully accepted the responsibility of being blamed for every ill. ‘Mera Neta chor hai,’ has become the cry of patriotism. And everything that goes wrong, all the flash bulbs glare up at the faces of our netas, and all fingers point at only one word – politician. And of course, our netas are steadfastly committed to bearing that yolk. All their speech, actions and ambitions are geared towards just the continuation of their claim to blame. And if they don’t do so, they can be conveniently ignored by the media and masses alike.
Yes, so much has changed.
But did you see the one thing that remained constant amid all this?
We never blamed ourselves. Nothing was ever our fault.
We are the cogs, wheels and levers that make our country run. We are its energy, we are its force. And yet, if something goes wrong, it is never our fault.
If you dissect the society, the canker of corruption would be clearly seen to run through from a poor watchman, or milkman to the richest billionaire businessman. The blackness of it will just depend on the opportunity it gets to lick up the tar.
But we are not to be blamed. The masses are only the sufferers of the corruption of the politicians.
Recently, yet another baby lost her life by falling into a borewell. And the social networking world flared up, pushing all blame towards where it is most fashionable to do so these days.
But why isn’t anyone asking what were the people in that neighbourhood doing? Why did they let an illegal borewell be dug? And then, why did they let it remain unprotected. Aren’t they at blame too for conveniently ignoring it till it ate up their child?
But then, it is nothing new. So often I see people continuing to ignore things till it is too late. And when something happens, it’s always somebody’s else’s fault.
But I suppose it has become our tradition now. And we can't be blamed for following our tradition, can we? It must be someone else who is guilty of our perpetual innocence.
