‘Haye, Yahoodi Saazish’.(Foreigners’ schemes!!!)
Let’s be honest, we’ve all heard this phrase uttered by our close relatives, friend or just a random person at least once. Me, more times than I’d like to admit. So, the question inadvertently arises, why do we blame other’s for our shortcomings? Be it security, economy or just downright anything domestic, like a McDonald’s Burger (Looking at you mom), it seems that the poor Yahoodi is always found guilty of some form of contempt.
I think it comes down more to how we are brought up. Even as toddler, we refuse to take responsibility for something we did from fear of discipline, and that seemingly stays with us till adulthood. We prefer lying, a long-term damage, over punishment for getting something wrong, a short-term damage. So in essence it comes down to the close-sightedness of humans, because we tend to measure short-term gains over long-term ones. I mean it’s a psychologically proven fact.
But sometimes, it has more to do with social indoctrination than, than human psychology. Now, I’m not letting psychology off the hook, mind you, but to consider the effects of local influence, we will take a pious, honest, ‘Doodh se dhula‘ human being and see how we can actually corrupt him into think that all his problems are caused by the glaciers in Antarctica.
In the media, we’ll start off by telling him that there is a servile water shortage, and that is because all the water’s are freezing up due to the light being reflected off the glaciers in Antarctica. Next, through creative journalism, we’ll try to prove that glaciers are causing a huge influx of ice, which is making their way into our drinks, and thereby harming our throats by making our voices hoarse. Next up, we’ll tell him that the economy is in the ruin because we are spending too great of a budget looking after our glaciers, completely neglecting to tell him that he’s a lazy bum and needs to get off his ass and work. After all this ‘hard work’, we will possibly have a hateful, bigoted human being with servile enmity towards glaciers.
What we did here was a very common political principal called thought control. We basically indoctrinated him into thinking that there is nothing at all wrong with him at all, and the glacier is to blame for everything. What this does is, is it kind of legitimizes the government, I mean, you’re going to blame the glacier for the freezing water, not the government’s inadequacy to create proper reservoirs. And in that sense the government can simply point at the glacier, and say the same when ever some one questions them.
As someone wise once said, the first step to fixing a problem is realizing there actually is one. You can’t hope to fix a problem with yourself without acknowledging that it is actually there. And anyways, na Yahoodi itne farigh, aur na aap itne special.
