Allowing the government to take care of us is always about the tacit consent to removing our skin from the game, superficially akin to outsourcing the disagreeable or difficult tasks to experts but closer to giving up personal and communal responsibility. There is a line to be drawn somewhere but apparently we ran out of ink long back. It is a vicious circle that we descended into at the time of independence, or maybe even before that.
I suppose the level of trust that contemporary Hindu society places on the government is quite unprecedented in human history. However, this high trust level takes a nose-dive when it comes to paying taxes, children’s education, healthcare etc. Hypocrisy is an intrinsic part of human nature but in manifests in all its glory when there is an absence of skin in the game.
Let me state this without sprinkling sugar. The safety of women and children in a society is the responsibility of men, not the police. Hindu households have been trained to scorn at masculinity. A good father is only a bread earner who happens to know important people. A good brother is the testosterone deficient sissy who cries when his girlfriend has periods. A good son is the kid who shares every small detail about his day in school and parrots the teacher’s sermons about avoiding firecrackers on Diwali.
Men over time have been degraded to a mere resource and as jobs become more automated, this stupid resource is turning into a liability. A society that is built on utilitarian principles only has contempt for masculine virtues like courage, honour, bravery and sacrifice. We have traded off our self-esteem for candle marches and Gandhian platitudes. No wonder we celebrate extra-judicial killings. Because we are incapable of defending our women. Because we have given up our purushattva.