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A better youth
30th April 1999 ANKIT GAUR @giasmda.vsnl.net.in
Dear IINN'ers,
In all this pessimism surrounding the
Indian political system,I even read an article in a leading
magazine that we should adopt the American thought,one thing
that we should be thankful for is that at least the kids in
India are pretty much mentally stable and dont go around shooting
their classmates like the incident that happened around a
week back in Colorado.The article in Time reporting this shooting
was really disturbing.
Ankit
1st May 1999
Chirag Mehta @chime.hypermart.net
Well, what to say ? I read it only yesterday in The Telegraph that a 14-15 yr old boy in Ranchi, shot his class captain due to personal enemity. I heard something similar happened in a school in Howrah (I don't have any details about that though). No matter what the country is, all these incidents happened only due to one thing : Access to weapons. Believe me, if every kid today in every school in every country was given a gun and a chance to shoot, half of them would readily aim it at someone, may be teachers, school captains, classmates or even family members. And this fact is not limited to just students. Imagine if everybody in the world was given a chance to name any one person and that person would die, then I think that there would be more Royal Bengal Tigers alive on the earth than Humans. Actually, these students are trying to vent out their anger, enemity and problems through force, i.e. Murder and Killings. This is the real problem. It has to be taught to them that problems have to be solved by other means and not eradicated with guns. It is just unfortunate that all of these students were able to get hold of guns and other weapons. If they didn't have the access, they wouldn't have done it. And if they were taught by their parents, family elders, teachers that use of Force is not the way to solve problems then I'm sure nothing like this would occur anywhere. Rather than this being a political problem, it's a social problem which can only be tackled by the joint efforts of every person in the society. And believe it or not, the Media is to be blamed even in this case. The method by which CNN / BBC etc. and almost all newspapers all around the world 'glorified' the unfortunate events and made them 'Breaking News' or 'Headlines' fueled the killer-instincts of other students. World-wide coverage, name in every paper, recognition everywhere... well, surely some people would be willing to kill for all that and may be they did. Of course, this was not the real reason behind all the gunnings, but surely, Media did give impetus to the recent killers. I think it's suffice to say that the acts of violent outbursts towards the society can be cured only with help from the society, i.e. parents, elders, teachers, etc. All your views will be appreciated. :-) Chirag Mehta
