Thanks, Anna, for the young awakening

Cynics and controversies be damned. Anna Hazare has given Maharashtra, and indeed the country, its proudest moment to cherish. What we always spoke of, but never dared to do, this 72-year-old from a village near Ahmednagar in the state has accomplished. The singular achievement of his 90-hour-plus fast has been the inquisitiveness about corruption among the young and the very young that it has triggered. Corruption hitherto was either unknown or a term that youngsters often heard on television or during coffee-table conversations within the family.
For the first time in the history of the country, Anna has inspired a thirst among the youth and even kids whose areas of interest seldom exceeded the realms of cricket and Shah Rukh Khan. Now, they want to know more about corruption, its origin, its ramifications and, most important of all, the question: “Mom/ Dad, will this entity called corruption affect our future?” When those who are the future of the country develop a grain of concern about the issue, we are certainly looking at a more secure future. It’s in opening up a new vista of awareness that Anna has flagged off a revolution never recorded in the annals of independent India.
A city given to fluffy, youthful pastime now has wrinkles of changes on its forehead. The young in Mumbai are all charged up with the new issue on the horizon. An acquaintance of mine said that his son, a student of Std XII, along with his cronies, has a new pastime — surfing the net, not for video games or IPL but for various scams and frauds that have been perpetrated in recent times — CWG, 2G Spectrum, Adarsh, Isro, DGCA, et al. My acquaintance said that his son, whose knowledge never went beyond the trivial, now speaks and enquires about these issues. But what impresses him most is when his son deliberates on what he could possibly do to stop the malaise from spreading its tentacles. It’s for this awakening in the young men of tomorrow that we owe Anna our gratitude.
Significantly, not merely the beaming young faces from town and cities on television but also the hinterlands and the backwaters have woken up to an altogether new cause. Someone told me that a school in Uttarpada, a nondescript town in Hoogly district in West Bengal, instructed its students to speak at the morning assembly on what they thought was going wrong with our country. It was their way to pledge support to Anna’s cause by way of this regular exercise. A source from Pakur town in Jharkhand said that some schools had introduced the theme of corruption in their moral science classes to make students aware of what was drilling our nation hollow. When we hear such instances, we know that a beginning — in the true sense of the term — has been made to weed out what’s eating into the common man’s emaciated pockets. Anna has taken the first big step. It’s for us now to ensure that we don’t look back in our stride.
raghu@dnaindia.net