The voice of we the people

Yesterday I got a forward in my inbox from one of my colleagues, which had the subject, “Please help me protest”. I opened it thinking may be the colleague had some serious issue at work & wanted to garner support towards it. But what I actually saw took me off guard. It was a mail about the proposed reservations of up to 50% for OBC’s in institutes of higher learning in India. After an introduction the mail posed the following question to me: “Are you ready to face the fact that - Our half of our nation will be nurtured not on the basis of merit but some other considerations (Sic)”. Then even before I could make up my mind it continued: “If you want to raise your voice against it, then please sign an online petition here”.

I not only signed in for the campaign but also sent a small note of appreciation to the person who started it.

This is not so much about my opinion on the reservations but the fact that I can have an opinion in the first place.

Not too sure if we ever had this much liberty to express ourselves? Today wherever you see you have opinions galore. The newspapers have articles written about what people think. Sometimes they have reproduced what is being said by bloggers in the blog world. Television news channels debate with the involvement of the general public, issues that are affecting the entire country. NDTV started it with ‘We the people’; now every news channel has programs that involve the general public. The latest thing that is catching on is the SMS polls that are available to us on one side to decide the fates of future singers, dancers and Miss Indias and on the other side to give our views on a variety of developments through the news channel polls.

This is a new revolution that is sweeping across the country, a revolution of garnering opinion and being a democracy we’ll find a variety of views on a variety of subjects. Not that nobody had any views earlier. They did. It’s just that today there is somebody to ask & a platform to speak out thus bringing them into national prominence. The reopening of the Jessical Lall murder case is only a result of this revolution.

As of now the only source to garner public opinion has been the media, both TV & print. We need more sources like that. Blogging seems like the next best media in this endeavor. But blogging has its disadvantages. The main one being that each blog is like one view & each blog stands on its own. It’s similar to each person having an opinion, now that alone can’t change much can it? For an impact to happen we bloggers have to become one somewhere somehow & speak with one voice and have one forum. Only then will the blogs be able to make a difference, else as of now with so many blogs around we only have writers and no readers and as a result no impact.

That said whatever little efforts are being made by the mainline media & bloggers is definitely praise worthy & should be continued with because like we have seen its worth the effort.