A State of Mind

I’m sure a lot of people reading this post will have heard this phrase on the news in context of the poor, so eloquently spoken by our very own Rahulbaba. He said that poverty was a state of mind and that it had no relation to materialistic wealth, whatsoever. While many people, mainly the opposition parties, went up in arms about the Gandhi scion making fun of the poor, it got me thinking about the rigidity that prevails in each of our minds. The set patterns and the type of thinking that we are used to, the mould we are set in and the fact that we absolutely refuse to think outside of the same.

Our set notions of our society, our country, our traditions and our systems refuse to change. It is as if we are stuck in a rut. We allow ourselves to believe that things cannot change. We let ourselves be fooled into thinking that things are better the way they are and they can only get worse if we attempt to meddle in these powers that are (apparently) beyond our control.

Well, I really think the problem is that we are afraid of change.

We think that we are in a good place; we want to delude ourselves into thinking that it’s all good and that things should keep running as they have been, for decades and perhaps centuries. Well, there must be a reason why nobody changed them before, right? But nobody ever questions the past. Or maybe they do, and they do not like the answer, so they bury it right where they found it.

A very intriguing line spoken by one of my professor’s comes to mind, “A revolution comes, but on an empty stomach.”

I think this holds quite true. We have this ‘chalta hai’ attitude that has come close to destroying our country, this ‘let go’ attitude that has even brought us to the brink of war… and yet we do nothing. We do nothing, not because we can’t but because we still have reason not to. But the day our false mirrors of excuses collapse, we will realize that we should have checked our mindsets long back.

That we can do something – Today!