Of beliefs & trends

Flower sellers on New Years eve in New Delhi. There is an irresistible hope in all of us whether one admits or not that this year will be not just different but better.-PRAKASH MATHEMAEAFP

Increasing importance to personal relationships and rising religious extremism are some of the trends that might define this year.

THE new year is still new enough, complete with hope and expectations. The newness wears off as events and time overtake it, but that happens a little way down the line; the new characteristics of the year still remain.

Prime among these characteristics is, of course, expectation. There is an irresistible hope in all of us whether one admits it or not that this year things will be not just different but better. In part, this is buoyed by the well-meaning intention to not repeat what are seen as mistakes, lapses, and blatantly wrong acts made in the previous year, and which one can now admit with the year behind us.

Expectations give a year its identity, true, but would it be correct to say that the expectations are, in essence, the same year after year? Not really. There is a specificity to the expectations, which do or do not dissolve as the year progresses. That apart, it is possible to step aside and look at what the expectations could be this year.

To begin with, the word expectations is not really a happy choice in this context; one uses it for want of a more apt word. Expectations is instantly associated with beneficial developments, when what one really means is the possibility of some things occurring or developing, all of which may not be pleasant.

Many people would have made informed analyses of what may happen in public affairs and in some other spheres, such as entertainment. The prognosis of such analysts can be serious or light-hearted, but they remain restricted to some obvious fields. What one needs to look at, perhaps, having stepped away a little from the immediacy of events, is the trends that seem to be appearing in society. This has more to do with long-term changes, and is not limited to the start of a new year alone; however a new year is a good time to consider these trends.

The first trend is a noticeable increase in media coverage of social events, which in turn reflect a change slowly coming over society. Consider, for example, the instances of inter-communal marriages, or relationships. There have been a number of cases of young men and women being killed or subjected to physical violence of varying degrees of brutality because they either married outside their community or had a relationship with a person outside their community. One knows of these because of the increased media coverage, but one also knows that the media do not and cannot possibly cover all such cases; there would have been many such marriages, or relationships, that have resulted in the couples being murdered or subjected to physical violence. In a vast and populous country such as India three or four cases that are reported cannot be anything close to the real number of such cases.

In other words, one can conclude that in these first years of the new millennium there is among young people a conscious or even natural lack of importance given to traditional social taboos. Put another way, they are giving greater importance to personal relationships than to the requirements of society.

The other aspect of this trend is that it is not confined to the affluent class or to cities; it has spread to small towns and villages, and among the poorer classes in cities and villages. Common to all of them is a basic education, not just in the standard sense of the word. These young people, have moved away from the world of shared beliefs and shared attitudes, usually inherited from their parents.

This in turn has led to another trend that one would do well to look at in the new year the weakening of family ties and bonds. Parents across the board are, for the most part, working parents. While they have been so for generations in villages and even small towns, in many cases the greater mobility of recent years has taken families away from their homes and traditional social groups.

But even within social groups and communities, parental links have, it seems, weakened. Why this has happened is something social scientists will no doubt look at.

Traditions draw their strength not from the fact that they exist but from the fact that people believe in and draw sustenance and comfort from them. Hence, the terrible incidents one hears of, where traditions are sought to be enforced in the harshest possible manner. But, increasingly, many young people find nothing in these traditions that sustains them or gives them any degree of comfort and encouragement. This, then, is one trend that one can safely say 2008 will see more of.

Another trend seems to be a move away from rigid ideological moorings as far as religion is concerned. This, too, is a trend that, though nascent at present, will grow this year and in the years to come. Before this assertion is condemned as ridiculous and based on fantasy, it would be useful to look at the symptoms that make one come to this conclusion. The symptoms are the spread and growth of extremist organisations in all religions Hinduism, Islam, Christianity, Sikhism all of which are aggressive, bigoted, and given to violence in varying degrees. A sure sign that there is a perceived growth in indifference or lack of total commitment among the masses to their religions.

This is not to say that the great religious occasions do not attract huge crowds of devotees, be it the Kumbh Mela or the Urs at Ajmer Sharif or others. But what of their everyday devotion? Where there is a perceived lessening of this is where extremism grows.

One example will suffice. Let us consider how many extremist, aggressive Hindu groups are there in South India; very few, with scanty followings, because in general Hindus there are more devout. Contrast that with North India, where the Vishwa Hindu Parishad and other groups flourish, and the difference is clear.

These trends will serve to give 2008 some kind of an identity; it will appear sharp now, perhaps, and, given ones predilections one can see them as hopeful or dangerous trends. But they do exist and they do define, in part anyway, what the year and the times to come will be like. Political and other identities are best left to the pundits who know or claim to know more about these matters.

One is merely mentioning a couple of trends one thinks will become more and more evident as time passes; they will pose problems and we will need, as a society, to determine what our reactions will or should be. Those reactions are best looked at when the present year ends.