Funda-mental-ism

To say that there is a rise in the fundamentalism amongst the people, I may stand completely wrong. To deny that there is a projection of increased fundamentalism through the social media and mass communication platform would be a blunder. It may be a bigger blunder to deny its effect on the people at large. Fundamentalism is the staunch support to a particular ideology or a group affiliated to a particular way of life or any thought process or just being part of the group by virtue of his/her birth. While we are at liberty to have a subjective interpretation of the kind of life that we foresee for ourselves and abide by it, it is okay to remain cling to it as long as it makes sense and we are not harming anyone including ourselves; fundamentalism emerges when it surpasses this limit. Certain dialogues attributed to it can be, ‘women are not allowed to work at par with men’, ‘caste X people are dirty’, ‘I hate religion Y’, ‘capitalism is totally anti-poor’ and so on. By its nature, it creates disharmony in which a particular idea is indiscriminately supported. Feeding onto them monotonously and by following them blindly without the application of mind is well catalyzed by the use of modern technology. For example, a particular incident that took place in a particular corner of the country of 1.3 billion population is being passed through WhatsApp, Facebook, Instagram, blogs, twitter and even getting quoted in the print and mass media. Down the line, everyone will be influenced by it. It has the tendency to be quoted in any way and been shaped by any kind of narrative and people would consume it without much application of mind. Think of the amount of propensity that it holds. We regularly come across people who have shaped their opinion based on something that they have read or watched somewhere and NOT because it has happened to them!

We live in times of people’s government, an age of democracy. Gone are the old days of ‘a king can do no wrong’. We have come to the point where we understand the value of individual liberty and the idea of equality and both of them coaxed by brotherhood among the people, i.e. fraternity. No more is the scenario that a particular group should implicitly hold a superior position in society based on their heredity. We have come to idealize the contribution and capability of the individual being. You can belong to any caste, class and religion, yet deep down you are first a silly human. You feel pain and happiness. You feel hatred, cravings of sex, cheating, shortcut. You tend to overeat and overdo and underdo anything under the sun. Yet we live in a society where social norms exist. We are part of that society in the long term. We need to follow certain basic rules and regulations which have come to be idealized in the current sense. Don’t do that! Do this! You are doing wrong by doing that! You should do this. You should not do that. It is bad. It is good. How lovely. Ewe!

In the past 200 years, human population has overshot from a few millions to near about 7 billions! Earth is overburdened with the demands of the natural resources. It is time for cooperation among the humans. The conflicts are bloody and they tend to start with a small pouch of hatred. I believe that we should be conscious in what we are coming in terms in our mind. Fundamentalism has no place in a globalized world. We are interconnected across the globe. There are multiple ideas and ways of life. We have different eating habits and we wear different kinds of cloths. We think differently based on the kind of geography we are part of and based on the type of norms that have come to establish because of the history and culture of the region. There is no way that all of us think the same way and be homogenous and one single group! We are diverse and we got to live with that. In the meantime, I have stopped fighting with my friends who seem to have a different view. I have made peace with it. I don’t know where is this going. I tell myself that I will not stereotype anything and I will not generalize the whole umbrella based on a single color. I mean, live and let live is so cool an idea.

Hmm.