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Do we need icons?
Hema Raghavan
The beginning of the year is a season for awards and recognition. The announcement of the Bharat Ratna and Padma awards is as keenly awaited as the election results. These awards, meant for outstanding service to the nation, are now sought after by political parties to embarrass the ruling party.
The Indian of the year is the media’s bonus and it is determined on the lines of a reality show. The newspapers and the TV channels challenge our intelligence to identify not one but many icons in different fields. This ensures the TRPs and circulation rates of the TV channels and the newspapers.
This is in stark contrast to the news items that the print and the electronic media put out daily for their readers/viewers. It almost fills one with dread as to what sensational news is in store for the day — breaking news of terrorist attacks, rape, molestation, murder, violence and shooting among school children, homicide, patricide, suicide, not to leave out corruption, accidents, road rage, deaths from annual seasonal diseases such as dengue, malaria, encephalitis, bird flu that complete the rest of the news.
It raises a searing question: do we need icons? Isn’t it a vicarious satisfaction for me to identify an icon because I am not one? Isn’t it comforting to pass on my problems to the icon so that I can indulge in my pastime of berating the world for not solving them? Why this fad to select when I do not know why I am choosing an icon?
A disconnect
Look at our universe. It is a well-programmed one where the sun and the moon rise and set in clockwork precision. The seasons come and go in an orderly way — never jumping the queue and always keeping to their time frames. But we the people have not programmed our lives in this way. The universal greed for a larger pie of the world’s bounty has brought about a disconnect between the individual and his society. While the God centred universe has been well programmed to meet our desires and needs, we feel no need for that great icon for we can run our little world in our own way and certainly not on course with the universal world order. We are looking for smaller icons as a replacement.
It was Martin Luther King who gave the slogan for the Civil Rights Movement in the U.S. saying, “We are the ones we have been waiting for” and “We are the ones that have to effect the changes.” It is time for a civil rights movement in India when everyone pledges to honour the entitlement of his fellow citizen’s right and space to live in his society. It is time for every one of us to understand that my own well-being cannot be there for the asking without the well-being of my neighbours.
Masters of disorder
But today we have become masters of disorder. We feel like a hero or a she-ro if we have the cleverness to siphon off the limited water supply by connecting our line to the main supply line or steal power so that we have an uninterrupted viewing of the soap operas on our TV sets in air-conditioned comfort or park our vehicles anywhere and everywhere as though we were the Lord and Master of the whole world.
We spit and throw our garbage on the main road or in the neighbour’s doorway so long as our own home is neat and clean; we walk on the roads and drive our vehicles as our inalienable right of way … these are small issues but which in their sum total lead to anarchy and lawlessness. We are good cry babies but we seldom look at our own contribution to the mess around us. We expect someone else (we do not know who that someone else is!) to clear the mess.
But we ceremoniously do our duty by our society by naming an icon. We never ask ourselves what do we do with that icon? Do we have the will and motivation to emulate that icon? Do we have the understanding that we and not the icons make the world? Can the icons do our work if we do not extend our support? To put it simply, do we know the meaning of an icon? Do we need an icon?
Sorry, we need no icons; we have to become one.
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