Moral degradation

 

 

BY VICKEY DAVID 

 

NOWADAYS, there is a dire need to safeguard human values that are declining rapidly in people, especially in cities. No matter how modern we have become in our standard of living and how elevated our education and thoughts are, our core human values should never be changed. We need to get rid of the fact that modern advanced education can surely and successfully bring forth values such as compassion, honesty, patience, diligence, kindness, behaviourism, respect and so on. The irony is that the more modern, advanced, and tech-savvy we are, the more impatient, intolerant, rude, peevish, cruel and disgraceful we become. In such circumstances, the point to be asked is: what is the purpose of providing moral lessons in the texts of the kids, if we can’t guide and instill in them the fundamental values of life? For instance, how impatiently and disrespectfully, our kids and youngsters are behaving with shopkeepers, cobblers, rickshaw drivers and their co-passengers and other public professionals! We have heard that charity begins at home. Similarly, culture as well as basic values starts from home. Our parents and the elderly members of the family can’t turn their deaf ears to this cultural degradation, for they themselves are repositories of values and ethics. Another eye-opening fact is that the moral degeneration amongst kids and youngsters is highly instrumental in the degradation of their psychic balance. Although we are demanding and craving for the highest speed in terms of the Internet, its virtual world and precisely in everything, yet we are at a greater loss of values and ethics for which we Indians have been known since the Vedic period.

 

This ‘cultural alienation’ is signifying an impending danger for our young generation who are more prone to pornography than to human geography. The rationale behind sex education and fastest technology is not the practice of watching porn clips on a daily basis and de-immunising their physical and mental health. Rather sex-education tends to make our youngsters aware of their different sexual orientation and their own sexuality. Consequently, this moral, ethical, and educational degradation increasingly occurring amongst our juveniles and youngsters, is largely paving paths for rape cases of small girls, even below ten years of age. Psychologists and sociologists are of the opinion that the loss of values and the tendency of not prioritising values may bring the worst results in the activities of our boys and girls. How astonishing it is that at the age of becoming students, our young kids want to taste the bliss of conjugality at the cost of devastating their family values and ethics. Often in such temporal attachments, we forget the most pertinent part of life that is being in touch with people around us.

 

This awful trend is not the advancement of society in the truest sense, rather I would term it- ‘cultural degradation for the sake of conjugality-in-temporality’. In the present context of globalisation, when the Third World nations like India are staring at the First World nations like America with a covetous look for growth and other facilities, why then are we not paying heed to retaining our cultural attributes fading behind the ‘false-consciousness’ of westernisation and the ill-education supported by it. The tenacity of our attempts to cling to our traditions, despite being a cosmopolitan person in multicultural Indian societies, is an immediate requisition. There is a need to regrow and refashion our values through indigenous cultures in order to keep our Indianness eternally with us. An eminent author William Somerset Maugham has rightly noted: “Culture is not just an ornament; it is the expression of a nation’s character, and at the same time it is a powerful instrument to mould character. The end of culture is right living.”