Wednesday, April 12, 2006

When are we going to change?

It's always hard to loose someone you've come to idolize over the years. It takes a lot of time to recover from the fact that the person is no more.So it is natural that when a stalwart like Dr. Rajkumar passes away, all the film-goers in India (who've come to like him over the years) are saddened to a great deal. It's real hard for them to come to terms with what has happened.

I understand that die hard 'fans' would be emotionally broken by this incident. But what I don't understand is why do we need to resort to violence and chaos to express our anguish at something that is a natural event in life?

What gud does it do ?
For us, who've grown up in India, it has become a routine that chaos & violence generally occurs when a public figure/a major celebrity dies and in a way we've come to accept this as 'normal' over the years.The same thing happened in my home state Andhra Pradesh when NTR passed away 8 or 9 years ago. The rest of the public doesn't seem to care for the resulting violence in cases like this.

Why this apathy?

By ignoring this what we fail to realize is that things like these would have a great -ve impact among the now un-ignorable foreign investors and foreigners in general. It even kinda reinforces the totally misplaced image of an Indian stereotype among the rest of the world, which we are seriously trying to get rid off since the last decade or so.

We need to think seriously about how we respond to events like this. Stoning a Microsoft Office for the death of a celebrity not only makes no sense but harms the image of the nation in the eyes of the world.

We need to change. Our mentality needs to change.

Update: More madness.......as violence continued for the second day claiming five lives. Dr. Rajkumar wouldn't have liked this even a bit.

1 comment:

Anonymous said...

My take on this is on my journal http://kanuka.livejournal.com/. Check it out and respond. Have been planing to write about it ever since the incidents. Thanks for being the push-button!!!

TC