Justice Katju called us all idiots and we protested – on and off the social media. The verbal and wordy protests were wide-scale and intense. But idiocy did feature in a lot of discussions off the record and many did conclude that all those who broke some rule or the other that ended up being counter-productive for the nation was not doing the right thing. Today when we read about the stone-pelting youth in Kashmir some of the columnists, politicians, and thinkers have brought out a new definition. They call them misguided. No, they are not idiots.

The perpetrators of fake news are misguided. Those who agree with fake news without investigating its authenticity are misguided. Misa Bharti is just another misguided woman. Millions of civil servants who seek bribe are misguided. Millions of bribe-givers are misguided. The rapists of Nirbhaya were probably misguided in some way. The bus drivers who crush school-going kids are misguided by their spurt of impulsiveness. Overloaded trucks that overturn on the highway are driven by misguided notions of profitability. Those of us who escape paying electricity and water bills are misguided. Traffic violators are misguided. Distorting the meaning of freedom is simply being misguided for a while until we leave the campus and get in a job where ‘azaadi’ is compared with performance and competence. Those who file PILs to get some popularity are misguided by their zeal to remain in the news. Well, even files pending decisions are actually victims of misguided activity. Potholes on the roads, garbage in dhalaos, wrongly parked vehicles, posters on sign-boards, people driving on foothpaths, jhuggis on every possible open space, displaced villagers sleeping on dividers in big cities and towns because their fertile land has been acquired to build apartments where no one is going to live for ages, crumbling DDA flats, and almost everything else in the nation can now safely be called ‘misguided’. We have stumbled upon this fascinating and innocuous word that doesn’t sound as harsh and unreasonable as ‘idiots’ did just a few months back. Being misguided doesn’t call for any punitive action and, therefore, we love it.

Well, misguided minds of India, please understand that we are all pelting stones in our own unique way. By the way, lots of journalists are misguided when they insert the distortion of views into straightforward reporting. Doctors prescribing expensive tests to patients who don’t have enough money to feed their families, engineers who sit in offices while their contractors go around doing the wrong thing at the right sites, teachers who assume that giving private tuitions during official hours is fine, students who spend years shuffling around searching for cheat-sheets to get their degrees, and even maids who swish their brooms a few centimeters above the floor to conserve energy are all nothing but misguided. Even those of us who think that pursuit of excellence isn’t about improving and learning new skills but the way we chase networking for unqualified gains, are not dolts and idiots but simply misguided.

Being misguided is the new mantra in India. I’m sure even Jaitley and Jethmalani are going to clutch the already weary hands of this saviour called ‘misguided’ to escape any serious repercussions in court cases. There will be a lot of people who will read all this and chuckle, ‘My job isn’t mentioned in this list and so I’m not misguided.’ No, you all are misguided. Only Justice Katju will mutter, ‘Idiots!’

Obviously, we cannot have Major Leetul Gogoi tying an entire nation to the hood of a battered bus and parading us though we are all as deserving as the stone pelting misguided youth in Kashmir. And mind you, India (and this includes Kashmir) isn’t a declared war zone, so the regulations of Geneva Convention are not applicable anywhere, Mr Omar Abdullah. We are all spreading terror into each other’s lives and need to realise that justifying misdeeds as merely being misguided is taking things too far. No, I’m certainly not recommending Amrinder Singh’s prescription of ‘a tooth for a tooth and a nail for a nail’ but let us begin by not calling disruptive activities as an outcome of being misguided. By the way, history tells us that political will and ruling with an iron fist aren’t strangers to each other… well, we know enough of genetic engineering to prove that they are siblings. All that matters is prosperity. Ha! I don’t mean misguided prosperity for a few.

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Are we Idiots or just misguided?

Are we Idiots or just misguided?

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Arvind Passey
25 May 2017