The Absent Need

Not a minute goes by without complaining about simply anything under the sun. It is quite a norm to badmouth people, behaviors, surroundings, system, government, weather, what and what not. Day in, day out, after blabbering about every single thing in the world, we move on.

Where is the youth that Jinnah had mobilized, that was willing to get slaughtered simply to give others their peace and space? Their minds and energy were synchronized for the help of others before they would indulge themselves in their own worries or comforts.

Sadly though, times have changed, people have changed, and so have transformed their priorities. Disinterested faces, yawning mouths, scanning the whole room, ignoring my stance; this is what I get whenever a debate ensues of what we can do, rather than what should have been, or what this is or what that could be. It is quite understandable that we think big and want to act big too, but in this race of making the “big” right, we often end up making a lot of small wrongs. It is naive to forget that it is always the small things that make the difference. We have got road networks at par with many global ones, schools, hospitals, universities, business communities, and so on, but what good there is if all of these mega projects are an eyesore because of garbage enveloping the pathways, unhygienic hospitals, illegal setups, unproductive graduates, and ultimately, demotivated and demoralized individuals.

In times as advanced as current, we lag behind in mere basics, such as, community work. Few things, done a little at a time, can reveal substantial results.

We have got a very talented final year student force from a wide array of subjects. Our institutes can align their final year projects to be a help to the masses in general. Instead of pupils making up numbers and forming mid-course models, they can be given actual realistic objectives to work upon. Art students can redecorate parts of hospitals, architecture students can restore old buildings, business students can plan doable projects for existing government departments and their sustainable growth. Imagine the amount of well-being that the masses of environmentally aware students can do to parks, IT geeks can do to the development of Government Schools, and so on and so forth. Likewise, supervisors can visit the respective sites to evaluate and grade.

Every graduate qualification should have a degree of social work as a mandatory part for the graduates to have completed. For say, at least 50 hours of social work. This could be in NGOs, government hospitals, community services, etc. Such a compulsion would ensure participation from even the elite and blithe lot, which will in turn help us all.

Another obligatory criterion to graduate should be that the students be involved in any welfare organization whose main concentration should be towards social development, poverty alleviation and infrastructural development. The young generation should be an active participant in assistance operations during calamities such as floods, earthquakes or bomb blasts, which are a common enough sight in our country.

A very thought-provoking fact is that nobody ever goes to the Police department for any internship or volunteer service. Our youth really needs to take up this challenge for, if not anything else, they can contribute immensely towards record keeping, organization, planning and execution of police procedures. They can bring about enormous improvement in the with their fresh intellect and robust brains.

On the roads, students can involve themselves in social policing, whereby they can stick around with the traffic police, be responsible for pointing out masses littering the roads, violating rules, overloading, etc.

An organization chartered by the colleges and universities’ faculty should be established. They would ensure compliance of the above and much more to help involve our youth towards community welfare restructuring. This will have a dual effect; not only will this exercise help the masses in general but also the individual in particular. A certificate of some good quality hours spent in communal work and a stamp of an organization that approves of it will significantly help them in their admissions abroad, because every applicant is especially questioned on whether he/she has been involved in any social service.

We don’t need just academic degree holders but we have to mold our youth a step further towards being a better peoples’ person and an eccentric individual. It is time to stop whining and start acting. So much has been lost already but there is much that we scan still hold on to move forward. One step at a time and we can be galloping towards improvement.

Franklin D Roosevelt nicely puts it, “We cannot always build the future for our youth, but we can build our youth for the future”. Amen to that.