Navneet Anand
Ending mayhem on social media, containing pollution, promoting compassion and making rural relevant are essential to make 2018 saner than 2017
The echo of celebrations of Christmas and New Year are beginning to fade. And as we begin to settle down and look ahead to set up priorities for 2018, here is a wish-list of four things that we all can collectively commit to do to make our society a better place.
Bringing sanity in social media should be our top priority. Increasingly, social media platforms, especially Facebook and Twitter, are turning into ugly places and platforms of massive bullying, taunts, abuse, defamation and sarcasm. Some people are increasingly turning into Twitter-pelters, as it were, assaulting their opponents real or imagined with unparalleled vengeance. Unfortunately, politicians led this pack of Twitter-pelters. It was seen in abundance throughout 2017 and a series of elections made it worse. This has a spiraling effect, and does no good to the cause of politics and politicians who already battle a credibility crisis. Among others, political parties should come together and formulate a social media conduct policy, which should have zero-tolerance for viciousness of any kind. A tough ask, but critical for India.
How each one of us should do our bit to curb pollution and improve cleanliness is another critical task we may set for ourselves this new year. Be it noise or air, we are growing increasingly dispassionate about pollution. Many of us also fail to do our bit on cleanliness. On both counts, there is no dearth of lessons and alarms – on how growing pollution or lack of hygiene can debilitate us by causing diseases, for example. While we do keep reading and hearing about Government initiatives, the component on people’s participation is often not highlighted or even ignored. The 2017 state level Global Disease Burden report highlights that unlike the common belief that it may only be limited to big cities, air pollution in fact may be on the verge of causing havoc in many States and in small towns and villages across India. How do average citizens contribute to alleviate this problem? It may be time for society to wake up and do tiny bits, such as voluntary use of public transport, pledging to take up a neighborhood cleanliness drive once a month, and urging people to use dustbins instead of dumping garbage anywhere. This calls for a massive reorientation of mindsets and factoring in of action points, which we earlier left only to governments but cannot anymore.
While one doesn’t agree much with the narrative of growing intolerance in society – that’s just the perversion of a few on any fringe – the lessening of compassion may be something we all should be concerned about. Culturally, giving back has always been a value intrinsic to Indian society, yet the intensity of penury and deprivation in our land is something that may reflect poorly on our compassion. There is definitely a need to do more – create a coalition of stakeholders and make more formidable, holistic and enduring interventions. As of now, the social efforts through corporate and individual charity may be skewed and are definitely not enough. Do we not all agree that hunger is the worst form of deprivation and a scourge on humanity? However, how many of us turn our attention to this? Fighting hunger should top the priority of all charitable interventions. We should run a campaign — India Against Hunger – and get all stakeholders on this common platform.
One last, yet most critical task, especially for us in urban India, is to reflect on the rural hinterland of India. Often the urban construct of the rural is flawed where everything regressive is associated with the latter, even as urban is everything nice and modern – cars, flyovers, smart phones and multiplexes. The fact is that it is rural India that sustains the country. The basis of most of what we urban dwellers do – from the food we eat to the clothes we wear, chairs we lean on, paper we draw on – are to be found in rural India. Yet when we hear of anything rural it is only when a tribal man carries the mortal remains of his wife on foot, or when farmers commit suicides, or when unprotected poor kids fall into deep pits. Rural India is far more than that. People tend to be more honest and committed in villages, they are closer to nature, more deeply relish human relationships and possess enormous warmth. All these traits are depleting hugely in urban India. We must respect the rural way of life too and include it in the mainstream of our discourse. There is a campaign underway called Vanishing Rural: Let’s Talk and then there’s the India Rural Dialogues series. Stakeholders in media, academia, Government, civil society and corporate must join this initiative to make rural relevant again.
(The writer is a strategic communications professional)