Prayer of ‘Aam Aadmi’

You’ll Protect Me in Distress, That’s Not My Prayer - I Shouldn’t Lack Courage in Distress.

You’ll Rescue Me, That’s Not My Prayer - I Should Have the Strength to Swim.

That’s what Rabindranath Tagore had prayed for in Gitanjali. It’s a prayer that each of us perhaps sings in our hearts. There’s nothing like sailing through a storm all with my own courage and zeal. There’s nothing like keeping my head high without bowing in front of anyone for mercy or help. There’s nothing like having faith in my own self and being confident. What I want is just the courage and the zeal and the confidence in myself. That’s what I pray for to the Almighty.

Well, that’s all what I want for me and my countrymen. I want my country to be a land of courageous people Where the mind is without fear and the head is held high, Where the world has not been broken up into fragments by narrow domestic walls.

But alas, my government doesn’t allow us to hold our head high. It doesn’t want to see us standing on our own feet. It wants to cripple our self confidence and make them believe that the only way for them to survive is to wait for mercies thrown out to us. We’re never provided with the right amenities that can help us procure our own food and shelter. Instead, we’re converted into beggars at the hands of the governments. We’re crippled to the extent that we can do nothing than wait for the free food and shelter thrown on us.

My government has broken my land into innumerable fragments of castes and creeds. The land no longer belongs to Indians of Bharatiyas or Hindustanis. Fragments of it belongs to the Upper Class, some belong to the Dalits, some to the Scheduled Tribes and some to Scheduled Castes, some to Hindus, some to Muslim, some to Jats, some to Yadavs, some to Bengalis, some to Dravidians, some to North Indians, some to South Indians........ There are reservations for each of these fragments.

Tagore would be pulling his beards apart in heaven to see this. He would be scratching off his own lines which he had written some hundred years ago:

No one knows whence and at whose call
Come pouring endless inundation of men
Rushing madly along to lose themselves
In this vast sea of humanity that is India.
Aryans and Non-Aryans, Dravidians and Chinese
Scythians, Huns, Pathans and Mogols -
All are mixed, merged and lost in one body.

Today the main effort of the government is to tear apart this body and segregate the Aryans and Non-Aryans, Dravidians, Scynthians, Huns and the Mongols and restrict them to reserved ghettos.

Let’s raise our voice and say, No, we don’t need rice at Rs 3/kg, but we need the right education, health care and infrastructure so that we can earn enough to buy rice at the normal rate. We don’t want to live on the mercy of the government, but with the cooperation of the government. We don’t want to be crippled by the government, but we want to stand on our own and make our own living.

Let’s raise our voice and say, No we don’t need reservation. We all are one and we’ll stay happily at the same place and earn our position with our own credentials.

The government may not listen to our voice. Because if there is no poor, if everyone has self esteem then who will it fool in the name of ‘Aam Aadmi’?