I would like to say that I am not against the Lokmat bill. It, in fact, sounds wonderful. However, holding the government hostage is unacceptable.

"Small minds discuss people,

Average minds discuss events

& Great minds discuss ideas"

People we do discuss all the time. The neighbor, the professor, the boss, the girl who can't stop looking at you, the girl you can't stop looking at, the pesky kid living down the street who rings your doorbell and does a runner ( yes, I know who you are). Well... You get my point.

Today, let me try being a little ambitious. Let's discuss an event.

In the early 1900s, an unassuming man came up with an unique, revolutionary new way to fight an oppression where the oppressors were colonists not only technologically superior but also better organized and better supplied. This weapon, if I am allowed to call it that, used the very pacifism that the common man labored with as ammunition to weaken the foundation of the government which was built on total and autocratic control.

The fact that a man, so physically unassuming, could oppose an empire with nothing but his hunger strikes and civil disobedience movements weakened the strength that the colonial government projected to such a point that it's function was critically affected. When the common man stops believing in the intrinsic strength of it's government, when he decides that he knows better, then such a government will fall. When I say government, I don't mean politicians or the current administration but the basic structure.

Let's fast forward a century or so. A democratically elected, stable government is being opposed by means of hunger strikes and non-cooperation by a physically unassuming person (no relation to the first) who completely avoids the fact that the same can be achieved through political means. The government is having to acquiescence to the demands to avoid mass disobedience by people who follow the man rather than the ideal. Such action will not only weaken the current administration but the very foundation of the government. This is self evident from the fact that others are following the same path to get their demands met.

Such actions have serious consequences. Well meaning activities that ignore the superiority of the government eventually degenerate into anti-social elements prime example being the Naxals and Maoists.

This article could have been about People. People so immersed in their own petty worlds that they no longer see the bigger picture, all in the name of ideals.

But this needs to be bigger. It needs to be more than the ideological bullshit that it seems to be, if I say so myself. This needs to be the wake up call for people to think. No single man is greater than the democratic government.