All is still not well

March 17, 2016: At present I am in South East Asia for a conference. I came to know that my views on women’s award functions in Jaipur, which I had written a couple of days ago , has created a certain resonance in the social media after few of my friends posted and shared it in their Facebook.

For sure, all is still not well. I came to know that in some of these hair clip distribution function oops I mean award functions hosted by organizations there are individuals who are the only decision makers . An organization means a body formed by a group of people.

In our country, there are many organizations on paper which are actually a one man or woman show. But surprisingly, there are several national organizations too which run on the whims and fancies of individuals during their tenure. I wonder how this can happen. An organization controlled by one person defeats the very purpose of having a collective decision making body. If there are failures due to certain incorrect decisions the whole organisation should be held accountable. It is always graceful to accept responsibility collectively.

So why not take the decisions together? When something goes wrong, the person responsible for making the decision is blamed. I feel, in such cases, the fault lies more with the people who allow him or her to take the decisions. A number of people have commented and shared their views on this in their posts on the Facebook.

My respect for the individuals who have supported this view has increased as they commented inspite of holding key positions in organizations that have hosted such award functions. But I am more concerned about those who simply click on the like option on Facebook and remain silent.

The tolerance debate is raging on and related to this is the issue of silence. Remaining silent is nothing new especially when one refuses to take sides. Silence is the best option to maintain a “decent” image when one doesn’t want to get into any controversies by taking sides. But is that morally acceptable? Being ignorant of something isn’t fine today as there are so many tools of awareness around us. For example, to make us aware of our consumer rights the ‘jago grahak’ campaign informs us of the multinational brands’ policies and the how we can be duped. I see a lot of awareness among people in this area but where it comes to social issues or ills they just seem to clam up.

I think many people who know when things are not what they ought to be and yet do not voice their protest in order to maintain their “decent” image. What about their responsibility towards the society being an office bearer of the social organisations? We need to take sides in life, assert ourselves against accepting a wrongdoing. There is no twilight zone, it is either black or white. To quote Ramdhari Singh Dinkar: Samar sesh hai, nahi paap ka bhagi kewal vygrah, Jo tatasth hai, samay likhega unka bhi aapraadh

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