INDEPENDENCE

Mitali’s Madness

“Emancipate yourselves from mental slavery. None but ourselves can free our minds.”
― Bob Marley

Independent thinking is a very essential human trait in these times where people tend to think and act in flocks. These times that have overpowered people’s minds with media or fear or shame, have left few independent thinkers in our midst. People fret over speaking their minds for the very sad yet true reason that everyone seems to judge everyone around and very few have the courage to look past that.

Any human cultural group or civilization is nothing but a group made with a few leaders and a lot of conformists. In such arduous times, we need people to speak out and share their ideas- no matter how naive or juvenile they may seem. The first place where this needs to be implemented is in schools on a primary or kindergarten level. Every child is unique- an empty canvass that is filled with various colours and somewhere in this process, they forget their own specialness; a child has a perspective that no one can understand, an understanding so innocent yet so deep that it takes people special degrees just to fathom what a child is trying to say! I feel that children need to be given confidence that any idea they want to share, however absurd, will not be shunned away. Nurturing a child’s creativity, not only through banal activities like paintings or sports but even through things like creative writing can help create many more independent thinkers than we now have.

 

Independence is a major reason for arguments in any household today. This happens for various reasons- generation gap being the major culprit. If I talk from an adolescent’s view, the level of independence an average young adult gets always seems less as compared to what they want. But, according to their parents, who were never given as much freedom as them, this seems like a colossally impossible demand. There are many other reasons also why adolescents cannot get the amount of independence they want but parents tend to become the scapegoats for this genre!

Independent thinking in the newer generations is observed through portals like blogs or articles or even other forms of art like music or dance. Everyone has a different way to express themselves and each of these ways shows the individuality of a child that has cultivated at a right age- an age where they might be able to vote or choose a career or facilitate the betterment of society. My only outlet for expressing myself is in the form of thoughts I like to pen down. I feel like it’s better to share my opinion rather than blindly agree with any other. For simple things like seeing a movie, I don’t agree with a critic on every opinion. Each person’s taste might be different. Violence for one may be an adrenaline rush for another (in a movie only, please!) and sleep inducing romance for one may be an enchanting dream for another!

Even though people feel that they think independently, everyone is actually consciously or subconsciously conforming to either their friend circle’s belief or their family’s restriction or existing misconceptions. Half knowledge is a very dangerous thing and this sort of conformity needs to go from our systems because each person has a right to live their life the way they want after completely knowing what they are getting into. I don’t deny that we have certain universally defined rules that everyone follows for the peaceful coexistence of humanity and that need to be followed, but the more localised rules, if wrong, must be questioned.

“To go wrong in one’s own way is better than to go right in someone else’s.”