How stupid can we guys get ?
Imagine you are Varun Gandhi. A perfectly sane individual who has had the privilege of studying in 'elite' institutions and is modern and suave like the rest of us. You see a problem of anonymity in your life, know your surname holds a lot of weight in India and decide to correct the problem.
You call the press, gather a bunch of supporters (mostly paid) and make inflammatory statements. You rake up enough controversy to be mentioned in all the newspapers - most of which criticise you badly - but theres no such thing as bad publicity, now, is there ?
And suddenly everybody knows you. People have opinions about you, most liberal individuals hate you.
This con job is so pathetic, it would have been funny had it not been so sad. Varun Gandhi is actually an election issue in areas of UP and the drama he enacted and is now enacting has people believing firmly for or against him.
This leads one to wonder, how silly can the mass populace get! Why, as indiviudals we all show greater mental acumen but as a whole are susceptible to such tomfoolery? How, as chomsky refers to us as - the great beast - that is public opinion be fooled by such trivialities.
Most argue that max voters are not educated enough or informed enough to be capable of completely rational thought. I strongly disagree. Education or literacy is not a pre-requisite to common sense and we all know that. How then can a Varun Gandhi fool us, and that too repeatedly with other names and faces?
1 comment:
I disagree with you on this. My opinion is that education is definately a pre requisite to common sense at a mass level. There may be a few exceptions born in some wild corners. But doing something without knowledge is like walking blindfold on a parapet wall. Its dangerous and very few manage to get it right.
The solutions to this problem can be thought as follows:
1. Make completing basic education and family planning as a pre requisite for incentives like ration card, voting and so on.
2. Introduce attractive reward on voting-monetary or otherwise which in turn will force people to vote and which in turn will increase litracy and decrease population(educated individuals are more likely to stop at 1 or 2 children)
While the reward scheme may burden the govt, strict enforcement of family planning may ease it, balancing the act. Far fetched but worth a thought,isnt it?
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