The social conditioning received from childhood stating you alone cannot change anything has instilled this behavior in our DNA. Is there a fear of acceptance of our ideas, social stigma or crushing of the ideas because of which we just hold ourselves back?
Many of us join online groups for venting our frustrations...but physically what we do to improve these conditions … is zilch!
A very recent experience which I have had is narrated below..
Near the station where I live, I saw a bunch of elderly gentlemen staring intently at some road construction work that was in progress… there was a small crowd that was already gathered there. Out of curiosity, I too glanced & on not seeing something euphoric happening there, nudged an elderly gent & asked the typical – Kya hua yaha, uncle? The response (mentioned below) that I got was classic and something which made me think -
'We have retired and have lot of free time on our hands....so when we see some activity, which concerns a citizens benefit, we all just go and look at the work. The contractor/person-in-charge at the site cannot shoo us away as neither we are disturbing him nor stopping his work! However with us staring intently, slowly a crowd is formed who all come, stare, say something & leave. This inturn puts slight pressure on the contractor as he gets insecure thinking that may be these people know something about this line of work & are hence staring. Cause of this instead of doing a 100% shoddy job, we might be able to bring down the shoddiness by 10-15%....the road that was going to go kaput in 10 days will now atleast be firm for 12 days...
I would not for sure know to what level this small initiative (if it can be called so) by this elderly group would work, but atleast they are making an effort!
If such a basic human behavior of someone staring at something can benefit us, then I am sure there might be loads of such small ideas which can be leveraged upon!
So may be even we can come out of our facebook n orkut accounts and see what changes can we do in the real life. Unless we want to crib and shrug for eternity....its time we got our act together and made a small difference in one way or the other. With time, who knows, it might snowball into something constructive that will benefit atleast some of us.
