The United States has the strongest protection of free speech in the world. Even amongst developed and mature western democracies, the US stands alone in its assertion that words cannot harm people. You can abuse whoever you want, deliberately show contempt for any and every group in existence, you can burn religious books (provided you bought them legally) and damn well offend anyone you like. No one will drag you to court. No one will even tell you to stop.
They will just turn away and not bother interacting with you.
Why can’t India be like this? Why can’t every country be like this? I want to live amongst people who are mature, who don’t expect the government to protect their precious feelings, who take responsibility for their actions and don’t throw their hands up and say “I was provoked!”
People in the US take responsibility for their own actions. If two people live in without getting married for years and then split up, one partner doesn’t take the other to court for ruining their life. If someone hears something they don’t like and go on a murder spree or a rampage, the justice system doesn’t ban the books they read or jail the person he listened to. Instead, they put that particular person in jail. Because they – and they alone – are responsible for their actions as an adult.
In so many ways, this maturity displayed by the US is the very opposite of India. Here, everyone blames external forces for their actions. A woman is raped, and the man is viewed as the victim for being “provoked”. Poor guy – he was so helpless! A mob goes on a rampage because of some book and the book is banned. The mob was “provoked” after all. They had no control over their actions! An evil spirit came and took over their bodies!
And governments treat their citizens like children. The people’s “feelings are to be protected” – as if they can’t do it for themselves. Governments tell people what is good manners and what is not. No one is allowed to offend someone else. Indian Christians go into a tizzy when an atheist exposes their fake “miracle”.
For god’s sake, will everyone just GROW UP? Does the word “adult” have any meaning to Indians? Everyone wants to be babied. Everyone wants the government to take care of them. Everyone wants to be protected, coddled and soothed.
No one wants to be free.
But you guys do blame videogames for the violence from teenagers ;)
In reply to Sushubh
Well, courts in the US have consistently struck down any laws that try and regulate video games. Also, teenagers are not (yet) adults!
In reply to bhagwad
I am reminded of a debate I took part in when I was studying for my undergrad degree. The topic was “Are advertisements responsible for influencing people”. I spoke against the topic, primarily because my argument was people are responsible for getting influenced by advertisements.
The judge for event, who is supposed to remain non biased on the topic (at least project that image) came up on stage after I was done and told the entire audience I was wrong and that advertisements are evil.
If this is the case in a protected environment like a debate, I have no hope for public behavior.
In reply to Meghana
I can imagine that happening – seems like it may have happened to me as well :D
I guess the very concept of being responsible for one’s own actions is alien to many Indians.
I couldn’t agree with you more…
I agree. I find myself at crossroads between what I wish it would be and what it really is. For the most part I chose the practical and deal with it. I wish my countrymen didnt display their idiocy in such Irrational and Cheap ways(and I am fine with idiots actually, as long as they are rational, classy idiots). But the reality is they do, and I find discretion the better way to go while dealing with them. I dont want the Government telling me what manners I ought to follow, yet at the same time, I dont want to be caught in a riot created by some “Provoked Idiot” on my way back from work.
In reply to Mysoul
What really irritates me is that I have just one life – and I have to live it amongst idiots who get “provoked” by words that do not even address them directly!
In reply to bhagwad
Hence Discretion!..I have only one life to live well with, so why would I chose to pick on battles I dont think I can win. You cant win a debate with someone irrational or closed off to objective viewing of life, even when everyone knows that you are right.
In reply to Mysoul
True – this might in fact be the only reason why I might prefer to live in the US rather than in India. Just one life…why should I spend it in a place like this?
Honestly, I believe we Indians are a touchy lot! We take great umbrage if we are spoken against and let our emotions rule us instead of our head – and that’s is what makes us immature and waster our time and energy in fighting for things that hardly matter rather than for things that actually do !
In reply to Ruchira
I think it’s rooted in insecurity. A person who’s secure will not care if he or she is “insulted” and won’t be on the lookout for perceived slights everywhere. Even when it’s a real insult, they just go “thbtt…”!
Two things:
1) The U.S. was founded on the principles of liberty. The U.S. Bill of Rights are restrictions on the government—they emphasize what the government cannot do, and what it needs to procure before doing that. In constrast, our rights are treated as privileges granted to us by the government—as though they were the largesse of some benevolent despot (an oxymoron, I know). When the government treats us as children (as you’ve stated, and chided in your post on Fundamental Duties, it will seek to restrict free speech for the greater good.
2) Like it or not, the foundation of India is socialist. My contempt for leftist policies is palpable. As long as India will continue to believe that the government is the protector and provider, it will trample the needs of the individual for the needs of the many.
It is depressing that the restrictions on speech are called ‘reasonable.’ There should be no restriction on speech.
In reply to liberalcynic
Agreed – so much comes down to how the people in a country view their place in the world. A few Indians including myself (and most of the US) view us as individuals. We are born alone and we die in our own arms. The government is just something we contract with to live comfortably. We don’t care about the “greater good” and people are responsible for their own lives.
Most Indians on the other hand view themselves as part of “society” – something that exists only in their imagination. They try and protect “society” without knowing what it really is and what laws it runs on.
I agree with you. I hate the fact that the people of our country cannot take responsibility for their actions. Its a shame how they project themselves as babies and point fingers at others for every action of theirs.
Btw, I can’t find the g+ button. Where has it gone missing?
In reply to shail
You’re not able to see it under and above each post? That’s strange…
Most people, all over the world, ARE immature and dont practice what they preach. Let me share an interesting episode as narrated to me by a friend. She told her husband who was by nature particularly insensitive to the feelings of others, that to maintain peace and harmony, he should be more careful about how he spoke to others, so that he would not hurt their feelings. He retorted angrily that he would say whatever he wished, however he wished and that words were but “vibrations in the air “. She felt repulsed and sad by what he said ( for she realised he had no understanding ) and left it at that. On one occasion, when she was blamed for no fault of hers she told him not to make her a “punching bag “. His response was that he would show her what it was to be a “punching bag “and literally punched and hit her all over her face so that she was left with black eyes, warm blood poring down her nose, lights before her eyes, a momentary deafness in her ears and a feeling that her teeth were about to fall out! As she stood before him battered and bruised, she had the presence of mind to asked him if he now understood the effect that words have on another; if they were just ” vibrations in the air ” as he had said they were, why had he responded in that brutal way ? She thought he had finally understood something, that day.
So dear friends, dont underestimate the power that speech has on the sentiments of others. Physical wounds heal, whether you want them to or not; more important is how someone else made you feel; sometimes those wounds dont heal ever…
In reply to tp
Simple question. If the wife had been bigger, stronger and tougher than the husband, would he still have dared to lift his hand to her?
I thought not.
Draw whatever conclusions you want from that. The husband was a coward. His excuse of “he was provoked is bullshit”. Because his mind weighed and saw that there would be no consequences for his actions, and he went forward and hit her. Those are not the actions of a “provoked” person. They are the actions of one who is unafraid of consequences.
In reply to tp
It doesn’t matter how bad the wife made the husband feed. I don’t care if the words wounded him to the depths of his sole and offended his very existence. There is a barrier – the world of words and the world of the physical. That barrier can NEVER be breached. If it is breached, then the person who breached it gets all the blame regardless of what happened before.
Don’t justify the actions of other people. They must face the consequence of their actions. If you don’t like something someone said, you can walk away. But when someone is assaulting you, you cannot walk away.
THAT is the fundamental difference between the physical and non physical world.
Sorry for being late to the party, but your blog is very thought-provoking! Though a lot of Indians won’t like what you have to say, does not make it any less true. Unfortunately us Indians have never really tasted what true freedom and liberty is like even after 1947. That liberty is every individual’s God-given right and is not contingent upon government’s or the society’s benevolence, nor is conditional upon fulfilling certain “constitutional” duties. Our basic governance system is still based on the same colonial values of a Master government versus Subject people relationship. Even the Constitution of India (which itself is a self-contradicting mess) leaves the government a very broad leeway to trample on citizens’ fundamental rights, for such bizarre and highly subjective reasons as maintaining “friendly relations with foreign States”. Even the courts have consistently limited these fundamental freedoms successively and we have lost important rights such as a fundamental Right to Property. Other civil liberties are pretty much a joke.
I feel it is a part of a bigger problem though. Everywhere in India one is expected to set aside rationality, sanity, and critical thinking and bow down to the authority and derive the masochistic pleasure out of the sadistic games the authority plays in various forms like the unending bureaucracy, massive corruption, censorship, societal interference in personal and private matters, and pervasive government control. Where most Americans across political spectrum view government with skepticism at best, Indians wholeheartedly welcome more government intrusion in their everyday lives. This has been prominently evident since last year’s demonetization fiasco. Honestly I have lost all sympathy for the people who cheered up as the government made a huge totalitarian move overnight and disrupted (and in many cases, even destroyed) their lives.
Indians need to be more rational and incorporate more critical thinking in their lives. The future looks bleak unless common man of India wakes the hell up, and realizes that:
1) Feelings and sentiments mean nothing against hard, cold facts. And that people have the basic right to express unpopular/dissenting opinions (whether right or wrong) without being incriminated in a real democracy. It is not government’s job to protect people’s feelings and culture or enforce moral codes;
2) Blaming all the problems on the British, the Islamic rulers or the high castes is not going to solve them. Blaming Westernization or worse yet, branding technology, ethics and basic human values as “Western” and shunning them is only counter-productive;
3) The best interests of the authority (government, society/culture) are in limiting the freedoms and rights of the people and they need to stand up to protect them;
4) Most importantly, India will never become a superpower if all Indians surrender all their rights and freedoms to the government. On the contrary, it stands a chance at it if they start working on taking this power back and giving it to the people in the form of freedoms and civil liberties. This is clearly evidenced by the example of North Korea versus USA.