People are the pillars of society

“Common man was always  neglected ” he said.

“In what context are you saying so?” I replied.

My friend Rajan had come to my place. We had met after more than a decade. We were sitting in the drawing room of my house. He placed the coffee cup on the center table and said “History has always been cruel to the common man.

I tell you how it is. We all admire Taj Mahal and consider it as a monument representing love. How many bother to think of those hundreds and may be thousands of men who toiled for years to build it. What we read in history and believe is that the Taj was built by an emperor in memory of his queen.

Nowhere is there a mention of the people who were behind it. What gets recorded in history and passed on to the generations to follow are the facts about the emperor.

Take the case of Pyramids in Egypt. Thousands flock to Egypt to admire the huge structures and think how they could manage to create such wonders thousands of years ago.

In fact the pyramids were built by the slaves. They were forced to live in inhuman conditions and were exploited to create the wonder.

Though the ill-treatment of the slaves is recorded in history, what remain now are the huge pyramid structures and tourists visit them regularly and end up admiring them.”

I had no words to counter his logic as it was true.

I added “I agree with you on this. Contemporary history is no more cruel to the ordinary man.

People are important now and they are the pillars of any society. Take the case of a vibrant democracy. The leaders are elected democratically with every citizen having the right to choose the leader of choice.

The ordinary citizens of a democracy are important part of the system and can either support a government or change it.”

Rajan replied “The power of an ordinary citizen is more on paper than in reality. The politicians remember them only during election times and do not care the citizens once elected”

I concluded “We cannot judge the situation based on exceptions. Every system will have loopholes and democracy has many. If you observe, things have changed for the better in the past few decades. The governments have become people centric and the advent of the social media has enabled instant flow of information. Information has become a very important tool with people. Political leaders are far more careful than they were earlier and people have started molding the society with their open outburst of emotions. The Tahrir square demonstrations in Egypt or the Nirbhaya case demonstrations in India are examples of this.

History is the witness to the journey of the ordinary man from being the exploited and unsung hero to a participative and society molding person."