fade out into the stars

"should i care?"

When Robin asked me how long have I been practising, I told him “seven”..as in seven months!”and he was like..owh..i thought 7 years..yup, im still a junior in practice, a junior is all I am. For me, it’s of great importance to treat each passing day as a new experience. There are a lot of things to learn and there are a lot of thoughts that cannot be discarded no matter how hard we try to ignore them .I am learning still.

I still remember discussing on our new project to organize training for young lawyers who are interested in urban settlers matter. It has always been a new thing to me, all that I could think of when this topic is brought up in discussion is, no one has the right to bulldoze one’s house leaving him/her homeless for the sake of development. It is also to be noted that it is the responsibility of the Government to provide proper resettlement.

It was quite a moment of enlightenment when I heard Steph mentioned about caring society which is part of the very ideal of development. Why do people need a playground in their housing area?why do people need a community centre in their housing area?why do people need decent houses, not one small box made of stone some call home. Well, ironically people who call this ‘home’ are more often than not people who live in a gigantic oh it feels like heaven mansion. Yah, I still remember some minister was saying “change your lifestyle” when there was a mass dissatisfaction in the air on oil price hike some years ago.and my first reaction was, “you gotta be kidding, change our lifestyle?hello!we are not the ones in dolce and gabbana flip flops walking around the house!

Where was I just now?hmm..the ideal of development equals to building a caring society. Why is it so important that we strive towards building a caring society?for me, individualism is nothing but selfishness. Everything that happens in life has chain reaction. When we stop to care, self-centeredness dominates. The whole ideal of caring society losses its soul. When a thing loses its soul, it is meaningless. Modernity is often used as an excuse to segregate the role of morality as a whole. When something grossly wrong happens, we are so quick to react in the name of ‘right’, individual’s right. Is self-destruction a right to be upheld by logic and reason? If it is, whenever someone kills a soul, can we say, it is his right to do what he wants, so let him be?or if a woman is involved in prostitution, can we just say,let her be, it’s her right?have we lost confidence in reason and virtue?

According to Aristotle, human beings have a natural desire and capacity to know and understand the truth, to pursue moral excellence, and to instantiate their ideals in the world through action.

As much as we claim ourselves to be the masters of modernity, does that change the very essence and purpose of creation of human beings? If it does, where have all our souls gone?