One of my uncles has had a great influence on the way I have thought and acted in life. My uncle has happened to be in the army. He is quite self-righteous. At some time during service in the military, I am sure he was taught that anything he said in a convincing manner shall have an effect that it will be believed and followed. And convincing he did, loads of it. At some point in my early life, I am sure that someone convinced me that anything that is said to me in a convincing manner, I shall take heed from it.
I have been an aghast learner for a good bit of my early adulthood. Actually, I was never a conscious learner at all. This is to say that learning was not my conscious choice. In the early years of my life, I was geared by a desire to making friends. To do this, I ended up agreeing with people on most matters, even if it didn’t matter.
Uncle wanted to become a politician. All that meant something to him was that perhaps the only significant people in the world are those who are at the peak of the ladder of the sociopolitical structure. To this end, he would make acquaintances, develop connections, and participate in political chores all in the hope that it would win him political victory. Winning was all the mattered!
As you grow up in life you realize that many of the personal ambitions you were set to achieve need to be revised and reset. One even has to throw away certain ambitions as useless and prune others to look better according to the needs of the time and circumstances. Personal philosophies cannot only change, but they also end up getting reshaped and challenged.
I was following a thread on Facebook in which someone from my friends’ list had posted the picture of a former military dictator of our country sitting in front of the Taj Mahal with his wife. He had written on the post that how the general had rationalized his amusement of seeing the beautiful palace, while if someone else would have done that, it would have been considered an act of treason.
Somebody wrote below it that there is a difference between an official visit and a clandestine meeting. It caught my attention certainly. I could not resist typing that it was the same general who initiated a war between India and Pakistan just at the time when the prime ministers of the two countries were having negotiations over the fate of Kashmir. That was an official meeting too. That meeting need heed from all corners of our society. That was about the peace process. Folks should have listened to that.
Later someone posted as to why our country has been a victim of poor generalization by the general officers. For one thing, the job of a general officer is to generalize an army. They are not hired to straighten up the rest of the country. There is another aspect to it as well. A great problem in our subcontinental society is the mindset of power worship. There loads of people who believe that power is Almighty and that might is always right. Believing such ideas, when folks climb the power ladder, they simply start endorsing the ideas of the previous generations of powerful people and the rest of the folks start accepting them considering again that might is indeed totally right. This vicious cycle never comes to an end!
Photo by qrevolution 
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Ramblings of a Wandering Mind by Psyops Prime is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivatives 4.0 International License.