The Grand Race of Exhibition

Just read the following lines from a colleague in my company. Her name is Manisha P. and she writes amazing and profound lines like these:

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“वो तो इश्क़ की नुमाइश करते हैं उन्हे इल्म नहीं. परवाने जल जाते शमा पर बिना उफ्फ किए हुए.”

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Now this is so deep a comment on the attitude of our present generation. (I would take the liberty to extend this Sher to more real life situations.) We can find the attitude of “नुमाइश” (“exhibition”) everywhere. We buy a costly cell phone and announce it in Face Book. We go on a trip to a foreign location and we rush all pictures and snaps to online albums. We hardly care for privacy. We hardly care for moderation. Some of my friends think they have got beautiful wives, so they keep posting their wives pictures on social networking sites. There is a race to “exhibit” as much as we can. Be it our house, our car, and what not. While doing all this, we forget that those who really “have”; don’t need to “show” it. If we divide people in classes, the upper class doesn’t need to “prove” its class by such “exhibition”. And the middle class can’t do it “enough”.
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The same attitude of “नुमाइश” (“exhibition”) is also visible in situations where we get either success or failure. We “broadcast” almost all our troubles and happiness on the net, among all our friends and those in our “friend list”. We make it appear as if we are going through something that happens in a century – either an illness, a bad day, or loss of a cell phone. Or even happy moments like a baby born in family, a delicious cake prepared at home, new LCD TV, and what not. Such exhibition of our troubles or happy moments in fact add to both respectively – we gain by deviating our minds from our troubles but forgetting troubles is no solution to our troubles. And if I am sharing happy moments spent with my family in front of all in my “friend list”, I may invite congratulations and envy, but in a way I would lose the time that I could have further invested in my family. And I hope we never reach the stage in our society, where we do good things only so that we can broadcast or “exhibit” such things in front of our “friend list”.
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So we should think about the proverbial flies that die for their love – the proverbial candles - without making a hint of a noise. They don’t want to show their love in front of the world, they don’t want to exhibit the pain in their heart, nor do they want the world to even notice their sacrifice, but they only want to do the thing they believe in. I think sacrifice is the highest form of love. Sacrifice of ego, sacrifice of comfort, sacrifice of choice, there won’t be a love story in this world without a sacrifice made from both the lovers. But all this is in so contrast from the way our society is moving towards… They say it is because of foreign influence. Indian/Hindu society always was inward-looking and looked highly at spiritual advances than material gains. The West always looked at material power as the salvation. I think this hypothesis is true to a large extent. But I hope if we do a little introspection at each stage of our life, we won’t be swayed from the right path.
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Let us wish we have poets like Manisha to wake us up. But just like clear conscience is the best pillow, self-reflection is the best mirror. Let us be watchful.
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- Rahul

P.S. This article got published in Alumni Newsletter of my alma mater - NMIMS, Mumbai, in my name.