A wish list for the new year

The mistakes of 2016 could point us to a better 2017

December 30, 2016 02:47 pm | Updated 09:58 pm IST - TIRUCHIRAPPALLI:

Idols of Lord Ganesha dumped after immersion in sewage water on the Cauvery riverbed in Tiruchi on September 8. Grand festival celebrations are becoming hazardous to the environment.

Idols of Lord Ganesha dumped after immersion in sewage water on the Cauvery riverbed in Tiruchi on September 8. Grand festival celebrations are becoming hazardous to the environment.

What will be different in 2017? Will we discover a cure for cancer and Aids? Or a spurt in honesty? Would there be fewer climate refugees? Or no wars for the media to report?

The new year may fare no better than the one waiting to slip away, but there’s no harm in dreaming of a year when these wishes come true.

Yes. No means no.

In 2015, the National Crime Records Bureau records said that a crime against women is reported nearly every two minutes in India. And that statistic came a little closer to us in Tamil Nadu this year on June 24, when S. Swathi, a young techie, was slain by Ramkumar in a crowded Chennai railway station allegedly for having spurned his advances. On August 31, school teacher N. Francina was hacked to death inside St. Peter’s Church in Thanjavur by J.Keegan, with a billhook, for a similar reason. Will 2017 create a society where broken-hearted men will learn to overcome rejection without becoming violent? Stalking and harassment cannot be re-packaged as ‘love’, no matter what movies say. Taste-makers of popular culture need to wake up.

End of the road for reckless driving

Tamil Nadu earned the dubious distinction of having the most number of road accidents in the country. In 2015, the State registered a total of 69,059 accidents, nearly 14 per cent of all road accidents in India. Chennai had the highest number of fatalities with 886 people losing their lives, followed by Coimbatore with 238, and Tiruchi, where 156 people succumbed to road accidents.

Reports of fatalities caused by drunken driving dominated the headlines in 2016.Chennai had at least 3 high-profile cases of drunken driving, with the same combination: inebriated celebrity drivers, luxury cars and high speed. Will the coming year drive us towards life rather than death?

Clean and clear

Deepavali in late October this year turned out to be bad news for the climate, as smog levels soared to dangerous levels. The festive fireworks displays created a denser suspension of particulate matter in the atmosphere in cities like Delhi, reducing visibility dramatically. In Tiruchi, civic authorities collected over 75 tonnes of excess waste on the day after Deepavali. Just a month earlier, during the 10-day Ganesh Puja celebrations, water bodies and tracts of land throughout the country were littered with Plaster of Paris idols and waste materials tied up in plastic bags. With every passing year, as festival celebrations get grander, more waste gets generated and the environment gets dirtier. Instead of creating more landfills for innumerable tonnes of non-biodegradable trash, why not downsize our festival revelry in the coming year?

Delivering goods … and garbage

Indian e-commerce industry bodies estimated the sector to grow to nearly 2,11,005 crore by the end of 2016, even though e-retailers are still making huge losses. We must appreciate these vendors for bringing the world to our doorstep. But can they find a lasting solution to disposing the outer packaging that accompanies a product? How much of bubblewrap, cardboard and masking tape is acceptable? And wouldn’t cities benefit from having a dedicated disposal system for dry waste generated by online shopping? Footwear and electronics sellers have already started taking packaging back from customers to reduce litter. Couldn’t online shops try something similar in the new year?

Meet you at the bank

While demonetisation has made us all look like the proverbial blind men (and women) trying to describe an elephant, there is one thing to be said in its favour. Since November 9, the cash crunch has taught the Indian to fall in line. Literally. Where once a security official would be wielding a baton to make everyone queue up, post-demonetisation, queues are formed automatically, with the said official also waiting in line for his money. But will banks morph into a quasi-immigration authority in the coming year? The rules for what will or will not be accepted as identity proof for cash withdrawals, for example, have created a culture of mistrust between bank and customer. And it was not too long ago when banks were wooing the same customer aggressively for loans and insurance policies based on almost zero identification!

Love all equally

Mariyappan Thangavelu, Varun Singh Bhati, Deepa Malik and Devendra Jhajharia brought accolades to India with their sterling performance at the Paralympic Games held in Rio de Janeiro, Brazil in September. Between them, the four differently-abled athletes (from a contingent of 19) won two golds and a silver and bronze medal apiece for India. But unlike the breathless coverage given to the able-bodied but under-performing Indian team at the Rio Olympics, no TV service (including the state-run Doordarshan) purchased the broadcasting rights to the Paralympics in India. Finally, fans had to be content with a bulletin of highlights from Sony TV. This isn’t the only way in which the differently-abled are humiliated in our country; access to healthcare and even something as basic as a ramp for wheelchair users remains a distant idea in most cities. The new year should spur everyone to stop treating those with special needs as second-class citizens.

Serial killers

On August 14, over 1,000 members of Tamil Nadu Chinnathirai Kalaignargalin Koottamaippu, which represents the television industry, undertook a fast to protest the proliferation of dubbed series on cable TV. But is watching a Hindi or South Korean programme in Tamil the only problem with small screen entertainment? When will programme creators come up with classy fare that doesn’t have to rely on shape-shifting heroines who become houseflies or snakes, voodoo dolls or a wafer-thin plot that takes several hundred seasons to unfold? Paranormal may have been the flavour of this year, but viewers may be less willing to become idiots for the Idiot Box in 2017.

Our wish list for the new year ends with a little plea for reason – don’t dispatch innocent bystanders to their graves with celebratory gunfire at weddings (as it happened in north India this year), or endanger your own life by posing for selfies in dangerous places.

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