माझा भारत - आपला भारत

संदर्भ - दीपावलीनिमित्त प्रसिद्ध झालेल्या ज्ञानदीप दिवाळी अंकातील संपादकीय
दिवाळी अंकास मराठी साहित्य परंपरेत एक महत्वाचे स्थान आहे. महाराष्ट्रात एरवी फारसे वाचन न करणारा माणूसही दिवाळी अंक अगत्याने वाचतो. ज्ञानदीप दिवाळी अंक काढण्यामागे सर्व वाचकांचे लक्ष ‘आपला भारत’ या संकल्पनेकडे वेधण्याचा ज्ञानदीपचा प्रयत्न आहे.

यंदाची ही दिवाळी भारतापुढे अनेक नव्या समस्या व आव्हाने घेऊन आली आहे. समस्यांवर मात करून आत्मविश्वासाने व एकदिलाने राष्ट्र उभारणीचे कार्य केल्यास भारत सर्व जगात बलशाली व आदर्शवत्‌ ठरू शकेल मात्र लोकशाही आणि राष्ट्रीय भावनेकडे दुर्लक्ष झाले तर देशाची अधोगतीही होऊ शकते हे भारताच्या प्रत्येक नागरिकाने समजून घेणे व त्याप्रमाणे जबाबदार वर्तन करणे आवश्यक आहे.


भारताला आज अनेक समस्यांनी घेरले आहे. दुर्दैवाची गोष्ट म्हणजे यातील बर्‍याच समस्या आपणच निर्माण केल्या आहेत. समस्यांची यादी मोठी आहे पण महत्वाच्या समस्यांचा विचार खाली केला आहे.


फुटीरता वा एकात्मतेचा अभाव - जात, धर्म, प्रांत, भाषा यांच्या भिंती अधिक बळकट होऊ लागल्या आहेत. आर्थिक वा राजकीय स्वार्थासाठी या भिंतींचा उपयोग आपले वेगळे गट करण्यासाठी होत आहे. या गटांतील संघर्ष वाढू लागले आहेत व त्याचा देशाच्या एकात्मतेवर व परस्पर विश्वासावर विघातक परिणाम होत आहे.


व्यसनाधीनता - दारू व तंबाखू वा तत्सम मादक पदार्थांचे सेवन समाजात, मुख्यत्वे युवावर्गात वाढत असून त्याला खोट्या प्रतिष्ठेचे वलय प्राप्त झाले आहे. दारू सेवनामुळे अनेक गरिबांचे संसार उध्वस्त होत आहेत. कौटुंबिक स्वास्थ्य बिघडून आर्थिक नुकसान होत आहे. सध्याचे कायदे त्यावर प्रतिबंध करण्यास कुचकामी ठरत आहेत. समाजात गुन्हेगारी, हिंसा, अपघात व भ्रष्टाचार वाढण्यासही ही व्यसने मोठ्या प्रमाणात कारणीभूत आहेत.


अंधश्रद्धा- धार्मिक अंधश्रद्धेने आपल्या समाजास पूर्वीपासूनच जखडून टाकले आहे. वैज्ञानिक पद्धत अजून आपल्या पचनी पडत नाही. केवळ अंधश्रद्धा नाही तर सामाजिक व राजकीय क्षेत्रातही नव्या अंधश्रद्धेचा उदय झाला असून व्यक्तिपूजेस अनन्यसाधारण महत्व प्राप्त झाले आहे. पक्षाचा वा सामाजिक विचारसरणीचा चष्मा लावूनच नागरिक प्रत्येक घटनेकडे पहायला शिकला आहे. लोकांच्या सामूहिक सदसद्विवेकास सर्वश्रेष्ठ मानणार्‍या लोकशाहीऎवजी काही व्यक्ती वा गटांनी केलेली हुकुमशाही आपल्याला पहायला मिळत आहे. आपल्या जातीचा, धर्माचा, भाषेचा, पक्षाचा वा गटाचा अतिअभिमान, आपल्या हक्कांसाठी दुसर्‍यांच्या हक्कांची पायमल्ली, राष्ट्रीय संपत्त्तीचे नुकसान, लूटमार व हिंसा अशा लोकशाहीशी पूर्णपणे विसंगत गोष्टींना समाजात पाठिंबा व यश मिळत आहे ही खेदाची गोष्ट आहे.


आर्थिक दिवाळखोरी - सारे जग आज आर्थिक मंदीत सापडले आहे. भारतात आर्थिक मंदीबरोबरच आर्थिक असमानताही पराकोटीला गेली आहे. कर्जबाजारी शेतकर्‍यांच्या आत्महत्या ही न थांबवता येणारी व राजकीय फायद्याची गोष्ट वनत आहे.पाश्चात्य संस्कृतीतील उपभोगवादाचा पगडा समाजावर वाढत आहे. नवी कार्पोरेट संस्कृती छोट्या उद्योगांना मारक ठरत आहे.


पर्यावरणहानी - लोकसंख्या वाढ व बेरोजगारी यामुळे मोठ्या शहरांत अनेक पर्यावरणीय समस्या निर्माण झाल्या आहेत. उर्जा संकट अधिकाधिक तिव्र होऊ लागले आहे. प्रगतीसाठी औद्योगीकरणाची भारताला गरज आहे मात्र जमिनी व निसर्गसंपदेच्या हानीमुळॆ नव्या औद्योगीकरणाला विरोध होत आहे.


दहशतवाद - या सर्व समस्यांबरोबरच दहशतवादाने भारतात उग्र स्वरूप धारण केले असून सर्वसामान्यांची सुरक्षितता धोक्यात आली आहे. बाजार, धार्मिक स्थळे व गर्दीची ठिकाणे दहशतवाद्यांचे लक्ष होत आहेत.


या सर्व समस्यांवर यशस्वीपणे मात करावयाची असेल तर प्रखर राष्ट्रीय वृत्तीची जोपासना हॊण्याची नितांत गरज आहे. व्यक्तीपेक्षा विचाराला, पक्षापेक्षा राष्ट्रीय हिताला, अंधश्रद्धेपेक्षा वैज्ञानिक सत्याला महत्व दिले पाहिजे. ‘माझा भारत - आपला भारत’ ही भावना प्रत्येकाच्या मनात रुजली पाहिजे व तसे जबाबदार व समर्पण वृत्तीने कार्य करण्याची प्रेरणा निर्माण झाली पाहिजे.

दिवाळीचे चारही दिवस आपल्याला याचीच आठवण करून देतात. नरकचतुर्दशी म्हणजे अमंगळाचा नाश. अमंगळ हे अस्वछतेला जसे लागू पडते तसे वाईट व्यसने व विचार यांनाही लागू केले पाहिजे. लक्ष्मी पूजन म्हणजे चांगल्या मार्गाने व स्वकष्टाने मिळविलेल्या संपत्तीचा सन्मान व तिच्या योग्य उपयोगाचा वा विनियोगाचा संकल्प. पाडवा म्हणजे नवी आव्हाने स्वीकारण्याची तयारी. भाऊबीज म्हणजे सर्वाविषयी बंधुभावाची व आपुलकीची भावना.


वरील सर्व समस्या भेडसावत असतानादेखील भारताने काही नेत्रदीपक प्रगती केली आहे हे लक्षात घ्यावयास हवे. माहिती तंत्रज्ञान क्षेत्रात भारतीय उद्योग व भारतीय तरूणांनी जागतिक पातळीवर नेतृत्व मिळविले आहे. संस्कृती, अध्यात्म व योगविज्ञान यात भारत जगाला मार्गदर्शक ठरत आहे. अणुसंपन्न राष्ट्रगटाशी अणुकरार करून उर्जाक्षेत्रात प्रगतीच्या नव्या पर्वाची सुरुवात केली आहे. चंद्राकडे ‘चांद्रयान-१’ सोडून अवकाश क्षेत्रातही भारताने आपले स्थान उंच केले आहे.
ज्ञानदीपच्या या दिवाळी अंकातील साहित्य यातील काही दृष्टीने उद्‌बोधक ठरेल असे वाटते.

Smoking banned. Good beginning.

Government of India should be congratulated for taking a bold decision of banning cigarette smoking in public places. The decision will go a long way in curbing this fashion tagged habit in young community to look modern and carefree. It will also strengthen efforts to educate them about its ill effects and be responsible for others right to breathe in smoke free environment.

The main culprit is the Nicotin in tobacco. Tobacco chewing also is equally dangerous to health and must be banned. Mere public awareness or health education is not enough to curb this age old habit in many people. There should be law for restricting or banning production, distribution, sale and consumption of tobacco.

Both cigarette and tobacco chewing are injurious to health but liquor consumption is not only injurious to physical health but affects mental health also. It ruins the economy of poor, worsens family relations and promotes violence. Still, government is keeping shut mouth policy as regards banning this greatest evil habit. The reason seems to me, the income to government through taxes levied on liquor.

If the liquor is banned, this income will be lost, but then, many poor families will be rehabilitated. Most of the news items relating to accidents, violence, atrocities or even terrorism or suicide attacks reveal that the persons committing crime were under influence of liquor. Liquor addict is ready to do anything to get the liquor, and the person under its influence doesn’t know or can’t understand the consequences of his actions. This leads to behavior prompted by only desire or temporary emotion.

Mahatma Gandhi gave a call for total ban on liquor, but that call got transformed into convenient and lucrative prohibition policy based on licensing and permits to liquor shops and consumers. It also distinguished legal and illegal brands of liquor. To my mind, legal or illegal, country or foreign liquor are all dangerous and do no good to well being of the person and affects badly his personal behavior.

Being a democratic country, government probably thought that the decision to ban liquor shop should be taken by voting. In Maharashtra, the decision to have liquor shop in village is vested with voting by women. This decision, though looks just, provides ways for manipulating voting by influence of power or money. I wish to ask a simple question. What is the propriety of voting in deciding an inherent undesirable thing as bad. Which woman or for that matter even any sensible person in the village will endorse liquor consumption. Some people argue that liquor acts like tranquilizer or physical need of workers and poor. It is totally wrong to advocate or permit use of liquor by them instead of educating them about its ill effects.

With the ban on smoking, my hopes have brightened that some day liquor also will be banned totally by the government and one of the main cause of unhappiness and poverty in low income group people will be eliminated.

Global Knowledge Integration based on Family Community

Too much information is becoming main hurdle in the knowledge development. Structurally all the information may be classified as parallel or hierarchically branched with current, historic or futuristic time stamp. Majority of such information is just replication with minor subjective changes with little addition to knowledge database. Information items are linked with each other like components of trees in a group of forests. Tree has components, it has evolutionary history and postulated future. However one tree is not linked with other tree. In case of information database no such restrictions are present. Thus topological network structure cannot represent truly, the information database.
The family tree database seems to be the better model to explain information schema. Family has history, current state and future. It has well defined structure with both parallel and relational links. Brothers and sisters or sons and daughters are parallel linkages, whereas father, grandfather is a hierarchical linkage. Every marriage links two families and expands the scope. The entire society can be represented as a forest with interconnected trees, each having its own history, current state and future.

Organization of information in the form of such a family tree database shall be ideal knowledge integrator. However, the task of linking all information in a logical way is a vast task. Fortunately, however, people have affection about their family. Blood relation is the strongest bond linking individuals together in family cluster. By providing a free facility to build family tree with unlimited space and variety of data modules, people can be involved voluntarily to participate in global knowledge integration task. Each family has a history, it has geographical references, it gives linkages to people who build knowledge. Thus people will be prompted to record and upload the literary, art, science and technology contributions of their forefathers. There will be free portal for individuals to compile their own family tree studded with information bits like genes linked in the DNA. On the back end, there will be a strong knowledge integration software, which will classify and link the information bits silently into a comprehensive database removing parallel and redundant information and creating well organized knowledge base for some selected specific topics.

Development of such a database is a challenging task. Typically family tree databases can form a base layer, over which knowledge databases will be configured for specific categories. These databases will have to be linked with existing knowledge bases which are well organized.

Information retrieval from such knowledge database will provide superior and comprehensive solution to the queries rather than present listings provided by present search engines.

Why history repeats itself?

First before proceeding further, let me ask you. Do you agree with above statement?If no, then look at the history of wars from Ramayan, Mahabharat to second world war, rise and fall of empires, love and hate stories, crimes and heroic deeds. Nothing changes: same patterens, same reasons and same consequences.
Convinced ? OK Let us now find the reason.
With the power of ingenuity and scientific analysis, man has tried to solve the mystery of nature, built many sciences, explored vast universe and on the minute scale electrons, nature of matter and energy. The only principle which guided him in this pursuit is unfalliable cause and effect relationship. He understood that for every event in nature there is a necessary and suffient cause and nothing occurs without cause. The earlier false beliefs of acts of god soon withered away and paving way to development of science on strong footing of cause-effect phenomenon.

However, ironically man fails to conceive that same rule applies also to every enent and behaviour in every aspect of life. Thie reason for this situation, in my opinion, is that man is so much engrossed in planning for future that he has no time to search history and learn from it. Probabaly he thinks that the situations are changed and old examples will not be appicable to current situation.

He is totally wrong. History stores wealth of knowledge for handling events of all times with predictable outcomes. His failure to learn from history and mold the future differently is the reason why history repeats itself.

Mahatma Gandhi - The great legendary guide for tomorrow's world

Atleast, on this auspicious day of his birth anniversary, let us understand our great leader and philosopher, Mahatma Gandhi.
He not only gave an ideal nationalism to India which is a perfect combination of Secularism, Hinduism and Socialism, he pioneered basic axioms for nationalism for every country on the globe.
His love for humanity, nature, his own religion and simplicity in life together with firm belief in non-violence made him the idol for all time.
His thoughts are very essential today, when the world is facing insecurity, violence and evils of capitalism on global scale and planet earth is in danger due to human activities.
Freedom of India through non-violent social movement was his greatest achievement in his life which gave a new strength to non-violence and trasformed it into an effective and nondestructive instrument for achieving any change, be it a social, political or environmental.
During the last sixty years the India has swayed far away from the those cherished ideals.
We must give some credit to our former rulers for establishing comprehensive administrative and legal infrastructure for governing such a vast country with intricate diversity in language, culture, social and economical status. Our great forfathers have laid strong ethical grounds in the social culture and peaceful coexistence. Many leaders stregthened the nationalism and created urge for freedom.
Dr. Babasaheb Ambedkar laid the foundation of Indian constitution with democracy and social equity as basic ingradients.
But what we find today?
The same words democracy and social equity are being interpreted for political and personal gains.

We forget that success of democracy depends on discipline. All political parties endorse democracy but infortunately fail to follow the essential prerequisites coming with it.

1. Resposibility - Constitution grants freedom of speech to citizen, but does not permit instigating speech against any person, religion or group. One must respect other's freedom of speech. Even if some person's views are not not aggreable or derrogatory to social fabric, only non-violent, non-disruptive methods can be permitted to express disapproval.

2. Law - No citizen is allowed to take law in hand. There is a legitimate legal system developed for addressing grievences of people. Hence disruptive activities, destruction of national property, road blockages have no place in demcracy. No man is above law. Anybody who instigates lawless activities has no right to talk about democracy.

3. Honesty - You should be honest with your own ideals. This word has become only of historic importance. Old retired people tell the stories of honesty and idealism. Now the people shift from one party to other party overnight, evenif the ideals of the other pary are totally opposite to earlier party. Unfortunately followers are honest with the leader and they also shift their loyalties with the decision of leader within minutes.

4. Freedom from prejudice -
Any fact or event should be analyzed without any predujice and only in the national interest. However, it is observed that opinions are made on who or which party has initiated it. This distorts the picture and separates the society in different groups evil to each other.

We find oppressed people resorting to strikes, fast or those in deep truble or frustation even suicides. Many a times, political parties, instead of suggesting and helping the government to solve the problem try to use such issues to blame the other parties.

Rampant corruption is the root cause of the failure of democracy and administration in India. Many a times, I wonder, how India is still steering ahead and preserving democracy. Is it die to helplessness of common man or universalisation of corruption. India's progress path is full of manmade hurdles, though essential for keeping track in proper direction, but unfortunately most of the times it is motivated to gain political advantage.

Every political party has atleast one favorite 'ism'. Congress - Secularism, BJP- Hinduism, Communists - Socialism. Role of other parties to represent aspirations region or sectors of society have also assumed importance in national decision making but their philosophies seem to be transient based on situation. Though every party keeps Nationalism and democracy at the top of agenda, their action is only in the line of their 'ism'. Parties are desperate to enroll their followers only for attaining power. Decisions are taken on number strength and power politics. Vhips are issued to keep members bound to political party. It is surprising that no leader of any party takes objection to huge digital banners proclaiming loyalty and birthday wishes with self portraits of local leaders at every corner of city. In fact, they demand it. It is merely confirm vote bank. There is no freedom to act otherwise making discussions a mere farce. This is not implied in true and fare democracy. As a matter of fact, every decision should be taken only on the basis of National interest.

If the situation has to improve there is a need to free the common citizen from any particular dogma and free to form his opinion on his own assessment. Democracy and progress will be possible if free, unprejudiced and responsible citizens form the majority of voters in elections.

What we really need is strong Indian Nationalism tailored by our great leader Mahatma Gandhi, which includes essence of all three 'isms' plus my nation attitude. Secularism ensures equal status to all religions, Hinduism, which is the broadminded religion of majority of citizen and true faith in any other religion can foster honesty and love for mother earth, socialism which has social upliftment and empowerment as the main goal. All these constitute the true national spirit of India.


Let us hope we follow the footsteps of this great leader and develop India rising above our personal or sectoral gains and lead the world for peace and prosperity in future.