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"The ambulance siren was blaring across the crowded
lanes and not one car of humanity moved to make way
for the man or woman or child battling for their
life".
"The man driving in the car had on his lap, a small
child wedged between himself and the steering wheel".
"Under the bridge was a gang of children ranging from
possibly two to ten. They were playing unsupervised as
is the norm. It was a mock fight, perhaps an enactment
of some scene the older children had seen in a
Bollywood movie. This innocence, did not temper its
viciousness. The younger children received repeated
kicks and blows. As a mother my heart solidified into
a thick clump of clay. What if a mother returned to
find her own child lying dead? How many of these
children would survive into adulthood? How many of
them would survive the physical and emotional
vengeance of their youth?".
Perhaps in the larger scheme of things, these
instances will seem trivial. Not important given the
magnitude of more urgent matters, like poverty and
corrupt governments. And yet, they are important. They
are subtle indicators of how the moral Zeitgeist of
Goa is formed. Of the values that are important to us,
and values we will shape in generations to come.
Richard Dawkins writes, "in a society there exists a
somewhat mysterious consensus, which changes over the
decades, and for which it is not pretentious to use
the German loan-word Zeitgeist.....It spreads itself
from mind to mind through conversations in bars and at
dinner parties, through books and book reviews,
through newspapers and broadcasting, and nowadays
through the Internet".
Is the moral Zeitgeist in Goa stunted? Is it to be
defined purely in terms of the resources available to
us? Is our lack of visionary leaders and role models
gnawing away at our ability to move our morality
forward? And indeed morality is precisely the word we
should use. We don't live in a world where morality is
defined purely by larger moral dilemmas like killing
or adultery. Our morality also includes the mundane.
It deals with day-to-day issues such as how we protect
our children, of not driving while drunk, of not
littering on beaches, or not killing near-extinct
animals, of not stealing company time, of not asking
for bribes.
The moral Zeitgeist of Goa, we have move this looming
spirit of the times into the 21st century through
education and dialogue and vision. We have to become
more conscious of how the world around us is changing,
moving ahead and we have to fall in step with it, if
we are not to be left behind.
selma
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