Citizens without a city By SATRAJIT CHATTERJEE

You know that society has serious problems when you look around yourself and see indifference. Indifference to family, to friends, to colleagues: to everybody except oneself. For instance, growing up, we have all learnt that throwing chocolate wrappers out of bus windows is not cool. It is anti – social. Yet we all know people who do it. We often do it ourselves. We know that we should help our fellow classmate, friends, or for that matter, anybody who asks for it. Yet how many of us simply ignore a friend’s desperate plea for help, and laugh on as he or she falls in trouble? Yet we keep saying ‘give back to society.’ The problem lies elsewhere. A few charitable people can never bring poverty to an end unless society wants it with all its heart, truly allows it with all its support. Donations cannot end child labour or deliver orphans from their teetering plight. Only action, and not words, can satiate the hunger of the thousands who live in slums. However society cannot change when there are so many out there who look the other way when a lost child asks for a phone to call his mother. We have lost the ability to empathize, to feel for the person next to us, those all around us, in our misguided bid to be ‘perfect.’ Hypocrisy is the norm, and in our two – facedness we have all become detached – become ‘Citizens without Cities,’ living in a void where no one cares. In this book I have tried to empower ourselves again – demonstrate the will of the underdog, the strength in the weak, the promise latent in society today. I feel that the first step we need to take in order to reform society is not to head towards the nearest NGO and sign up as volunteers when inwardly we’d rather be doing something else; but to educate ourselves and those around us of how we can change for better, how we can learn to feel again – to empathize again. And when we can bring ourselves to truly be able to that, we’ll all find ourselves doing exactlywhat is necessary to help those around us. ‘We can only solve a problem when we know the problem.’ I know these are things are things we all know, but ‘There comes a time when we must heed a certain call, When the world must come together as one’ And the call was never louder than it is today.

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