"India - a land of myths and dreams"

How ironical it can get that world’s 2^nd most populous and oldest civilization is a rare combination of myths and dreams. India, being famously known as the land of snake charmers for centuries, has never been able to completely annul its that image despite tremendous growth and development that we have witnessed in the last 3 decades. What adds further to the locus of this is how majority of the people in India still believe in themes of centuries old myths, fallacies, absurdity, black magic, witchcraft, etc. It’s worrying to see how eager people seem in this country to impress their deities for a little showering of divine grace and blessings. In one of the many such shocking cases, a khap panchayat in India issued an order of not allowing girls to get birth in their village as they thought that letting girls born would draw the wrath of rain god and they might have to face drought because of it. These cases make me question the very basic existence of our human intellect, if there is any. Were we born to be that much unreasonable and illogical that we would become the slaughters of the worst kind for nothing but piece of worthless myths. 

More than 65% of our population is below 35 years of age and despite that the number of people indulging in such kind of senseless, illogical stunts is no less than cyclopean. What’s more alarming and staggering is that most of the people indulging in such kind of gimmicks and irrationality are educated literates. This definitely raises questions on the quality of the education that is being imparted in this country or have these myths become so much ingrained and imbibed in us through generations that we have started treating them as a part of our social and religious values. Something somewhere has surely gone wrong. 

Despite having an educational system in place for most part of the last century, I see two completely diverse, opposite India. Both are educated but they seem poles apart. The first part of the India that I see is the one with aspirations and desires. They are surely moving ahead adopting art of deduction, inferences, and rationality as a means of living their lives. They seem to be adapting well with the changing times, and hence slowly but steadily they are drifting away from the fallacies that have strangled them for long, thereby helping society to become an organized tranquil place to live. And, the other India that I see despite being educated looks stuck behind in the fissure of gloominess, completely deprived of sense, struggling to keep terms with changing demands and times, thus trying to make its presence felt by indulging in activities which are nothing short of anarchistic in nature. The first India has dreams, and other one has myths. It’s the rare addendum of these two which makes for an intriguing sense of distress in me. On one hand, we have great scientists, philosophers, intellectuals and on the other side, we have those who follow the themes of irrationality just to show their kookiness and ludicrousness. 

This is evident that what we need now is not just education but a system, a society, a way of thinking where rationality is given more importance than those meaningless myths, where people are given freedom to make their choices and not just choked and suffocated in the adamancy of following those farce fallacies. Maybe the time has come for us all to show solidarity in creating such a system. We have lived long in those disillusioned world of ignorance where we have let irrationality overshadow rationality, impracticality overpower practicality. Time for change is here and it’s up to us to grab it.