Opportunism

Today we are proudly masquerading as free Indian, but we wouldn’t have got our freedom without the highly principled freedom fighters under the leadership of Mahatma Gandhi sacrificing their lives for a lofty goal. The Mahatma was a person who lived, persevered and died holding his principles high. Every year the whole nation remembers this great son of India. We feel proud to inherit his legacy.

We do remember our Harshad Mehthas and shudder and cringe inwardly at the very thought that he was one of us. He did gain his momentous glory, but did it last?

As we stand on the threshold of 21^st century, our priorities have become ‘high living and low thinking’. Our success is measured in our possessions, bank balances and the amount of dowry ‘Social Bigwigs’ pay. Successive compromises and incursion of western ideology have given a crushing blow to the Indian life style paved on integrity, instead we are seriously thinking of flouting principles and justifying! Bharath, the land of great epics Mahabharat and Ramayana, which has symbolically shown us the unprincipled go to their certain downfall, has a unique culture based on principles! Yet we are here thrashing out this issue of unprincipled behaviour. Who ever dreamed up the unprincipled ‘float’? Of course they may float on some rivers as unfortunate pieces of history!!!!

Have you heard of the fox that tried to drink the blood dripping from the goats’ foreheads when they were furiously bumping their heads? The opportunists can never be complacent for moment, because if they become they will have the fox’s fate. If one is an opportunist he will succeed only if the majority of the others are principled. It will only be a matter of time before someone like him/ her comes along and knocks him over.

Proponents of opportunism may say that it is much easier to forget our principles and ‘make hay while the sun shines’. I do agree it is easy to be unprincipled, but can they really have such an easy time? Majority of us are idealists; we can’t think of others being selfish, greedy and inconsiderate, neither can we tolerate when others throw integrity to the wind, but when it comes to our own self the criticism disappears, instead we just compromise and say ‘never mind’. It may be true that it is difficult to uphold the lofty principles in this unscrupulous world.

Yet we have our Mahatmas whose ideology we are a part of.