That one word we will never hear in ‘public’ discussions…
I was watching the last week’s Neeyanaana show on whether schools should be reopened or not now (owing to COVID).
There was one point that caught my attention — a girl claimed that her admission to a Singapore college/university is a question mark due to the unfair allotment of marks in 10th std. public exam. (no exams being kept)
When I watched the same program to write this post, I found 3 related conversations:
1. The points by Nedunchezian were countered by Dr Poovannan Ganapthy who argues about the reservation of seats and the RTE.
2. A principal (or a teacher) who said her daughter’s admission to a prestigious institution was also tampered with by the COVID messing the higher secondary public exams
3. Gopinath criticising HDFC’s notification exempting 2021 batch graduates from attending an interview as unethical
I found a common thread in all these claims.
That no one openly, verbally acknowledges the below:
Life’s unfair; it never treats everyone equally; you have your own (dis)advantages.
I remember one answer by our CEO Sridhar Vembu when he was asked a similar question related to demographic advantage. He has emphasised this umpteen number of times — that ‘you cannot assure success, you can only deserve it’
Please note that my claim is NOT that the anchors/participants do not know/accept, life’s unfair. Instead, it’s that they just DO NOT PUBLICLY ACKNOWLEDGE it.
Later I observed that I had not heard this in any TV/public discussion — From everyone’s argument, we could sense that they very much know about the irrationality of life. But they very consciously swallow it and assure with high attention that they DO NOT verbally acknowledge it.
I thought about the reason and could arrive at one conclusion — When we acknowledge verbally — “Yes, Life is unfair & irrational, we cannot deny that” — then slowly, you are bound to somehow accept things like Karma, ஊழ், unknown factors, etc. They can be even cornered whether they accept God and they might be labelled as irrational, old-fashioned, politically incorrect, poorshvas, etc.
Say for eg. Try to discuss a topic with your friend/spouse in which you both disagree. Do it first casually, and repeat the same experiment by just recording it with your mobile camera. Just observe how our tone changes, and how we lose our personal touch and sound to be politically correct in every sentence when the camera (just a mobile cam) is on.
This is what happens in all the TV/talk shows. Every word, Every letter, everything we say, we (un/sub)consciously utter politically correct statements and the discussion becomes a sort of haystack.
So let’s acknowledge the below fact without any hesitation:
Life’s mostly (~always) unfair & success’ a probability and is always uncertain
Update on 17th September 2021:
Team, A late reply.
First, let me acknowledge one thing — ‘Why me’ is my question too even for trivial things. So I am no saint in this regard.
But we should be aware of the fact that life is always irrational which helps us to regain back after one night sleep after any type of disappointment.
The reason for the post is TV has an uneven amount of audience who do not read/interact intellectually nor write/push themselves.
So it will be great if anyone acknowledges such things — atleast a minuscule amount of the audience will look at the outside world.
But in this post-liberalisation era, TV tries to overly publicise many personal things and tries to create a false oneness.
We all know many open secrets — Pandey will NOT criticise BJP, Many channels will not even give the slightest credit to right-wing, fake liberals who will not question the blunders of communists and will not acknowledge the good things of religion… everyone has their own soft corners. But at the outset, we all tend to show off that we voice for equality but everyone personally knows very much that we all have our own (dis)advantages.
The post is aimed at 2 things:
1. To the audience, shun the TV media preferably
2. When we participate in any kind of discussion, let’s acknowledge the irrational facts (for instance, COVID is irrational, only cares about scientific things and gives a damn about ‘political correctness nonsense, so we need to acknowledge that first and then start a debate) first.
That said, when we acknowledge the irrationality of life, we tend to have a balance about the result of our efforts (indeed we do not care so much about the so-called ‘positive’ result). So acknowledging the uncertainty is NOT to be idle and leave everything to fate(?!) or whatever. Instead, to embrace it and be ready to accept even the not-so-desirable outcome when it happens.
Hope this is clear.
