Less 'senti', more 'mental'

Suddenly, all too suddenly, we have made a point of hyperventilating over just about anything around us – social, domestic, political - pick any issue and we have ample reasons to feel ‘offended’ and ‘hurt’.

Our urgency to react, raise an alarm and rebel is getting to levels of absurdity and making me wince with absolute disgust. Not that we are not aware of our sickening but growing propensity to kick up rows, not that we personally support such indiscriminating clamour, not that we don’t know that it is all but part of a larger, individual design in the portals of power and pelf, not that we don’t know how ridiculous we sound and silly we look and not that we are not bored with it. Yet we put up with the theatrics, merely because we, the common men and women, need to get by. It is a world of the supremely strong, sumptuously vain and severely antagonistic clusters of people and the last thing we want is to get caught in the cross fire of indiscriminate wrangling and ego wars.

But we are a sensitive lot, mind you. I need to keep saying this, to survive in these tumultuous times. We are awfully sensitive and I am scared out of my wits to say anything about anybody ouside my family. Who knows what can get me into a flap, whose sentiment and pride can be hurt and what if the wound that I inflict causes him/them to bleed and then, to die (martyred??)? I don’t intend risking such eventuality, not when my business of life is cruising along with its own small and not so small concerns.

Yes, I am self-centred, to the point of being indifferent to the dramatic overtures of the more sensitive, less sensible slice of our democratic society.

I am self centred to the extent that I feel deeply for the thousands rendered homeless in many parts of the world, thanks to natural and man made calamities. It is just another television grab for those of us watching it from our living rooms, but to those out there, it’s a life put paid to. Their immediate wait is for an air dropped meal, their next dream is about a home to call their own, their plight much worse than what a copter riding politician can know from above.

I feel angry about the injustices in the world, much of which is beyond my comprehension and my power of suggesting solutions.

I feel helpless and frightened when the imbalances in the society affect the weakest and the rage over the inequity spills over, spreads and takes vast swathes of the world into its fold.

I feel depressed when a father rapes his daughter, parents kill their children for honour, debt worn peasants commit suicide, double crossing politicians come scrounging for our benevolence, and fritter our money on weird things from statues to feeding pampered airline employees and worse still, when we question, put up a nauseating charade of being austere…ugh!

Yes, I am sensitive and there are things that I am concerned about, but they don’t push me to burn and break, they don’t turn me into a vandal, they don’t make me a pseudo rebel. I must confess, I don’t have the sensibility required for such response, much less the inclination and nerve.

For some reason (and condemn me for it if you like), my sentiments are not hurt when someone makes a caste remark in a movie or if a former diplomat punches a cattle class tweet or the city I live in is called by its former name or a veteran artist in exile has shown a Hindu God in poor colours. There are better things in life for me than these to ponder on. My belief system is not so fragile as to be shattered or smeared by a remark or artistic rendition. My faith is not so shallow as to be disturbed by passing winds of disregard. And my sentiments not so touchy as to be hurt by nondescript issues that have no bearing on my heart or hearth.

To those who have made a sport or vocation of extremist activity, there are ample opportunities to revel in. But to me and those of my ilk, wearing social sentiments on the sleeve and making war cries is simply gauche and absurd.