To Aspire…To Inspire!

Youth Leadership | January 9, 2011 | Share

“O World of many worlds, O life of lives,
What centre hast thou? Where am I?”

These were once just the words of a poem; now they are the question that fuel man’s elemental drive for validity of his existence. Ever since man took his first step on earth it’s been a constant battle of dominion against nature and all its facets. The march of self preservation and self perpetuation never halted long enough to give man a chance to take stock of his life. So the poets and writers filed away all those little thoughts and emotions in verse, in hopes that there will come a time when we shall finally look inside.

Well that time finally came around! We finally reached a stable enough plateau in human society where we could sit back and ponder, and as I pondered along with the rest, I alarmingly realized that we weren’t the great and magnificent people we were cracked up to be. Pretenses slipped, illusions vanished and the splits and rips in the fabric of humanity bared themselves and the naked ugliness. What we had become in the course of time was so revolting that my instincts were to pour bleach in the insides of my brains and fry it all. The political power games, the invasions, the wars, the religious persecutions, and the communal oppressions, what hadn’t we done? Everywhere I turned I could see heaps of human filth covered in the stench of indignity… and …I felt the innocence die inside me… I wasn’t a man anymore; I was the walking dead!

The most unnerving part of the whole experience is that no one seemed to care; everyone was so blissfully unaware or at least pretending to be so that it felt like Gandhi’s 3 monkeys were incarnate in all, and this cowardliness was the biggest insult of all. So for some time I became the same, indifferent! I too tried the infamous “time pass” lifestyle of our youth, the aimless wandering through life where you worked just enough to get by and spent your free time insulting/using others in a feeble attempt to suck some self esteem. But fortunately for me I couldn’t make such a good mockery of the human spirit, it eventually won out.

I don’t really regret the whole experience anyway; it made me a lot more sensitive to my emotions and of those around me. That’s why I don’t believe that everyone is that indifferent, coz I can smell the rotting corpses of their faith in humanity, in God… buried deep within. But even that revelation doesn’t give me peace since it’s come at a steep cost, the cost of our aspirations, of our inspirations. Have you noticed how uninspired we have become? The life that used to thrive in theater, and music, and literature has gone dry. Where once we used to aspire to greatness, we have now become content with mediocrity. So much so, that architecture, which has been our tool for stamping our legacy on the face of the planet thru pyramids and palaces, towers and tombs, an eye to detail and sculptor genius has died and paved way to plain functional designs and straight lines. Where once you just had to take a walk down a street and you could feel the life flowing thru the city, is now replaced by row after row of simple practical designs… let’s face it, inspiration is dying, and if human life can’t thrive today, then how can divinity. Maybe that’s the reason why most of our youth don’t really believe in God anymore.

I don’t really know what situations writers and poets back then faced, but as I see our whole generation losing faith, hope… I can imagine what they felt as they tried to inspire a whole generation of people to aspire towards something better. Here I can sense many such writers dying to give expression to their emotions, and I wish that you guys will help me in writing a new future for the next generation, to give them hope even when we don’t feel it, to give them inspiration even when we see the ugliness, to make them want to aspire to something great. If today I can persuade any of you to join me in this endeavor, I too would feel like I am a writer, coz that’s what we do, we inspire…

Pancham Bhardwaj