My choice- really?

The media is abuzz about making choices. The recent Deepika Padukone featuring short film showcases women making their points on liberation and empowerment. They want to make their own choices. They want to be free from the male chauvinistic and paternalistic society we are in. But something struck a wrong chord. Many people were offended than inspired by the two minute video that is going viral among netizens. Some argue that the choices the film talked about were concerning the elite and urban women only, while the rural illiterate woman needs empowerment for more basic issues like survival, food and protection from abuse. Forget about sexual freedom, they need cover from domestic violence and child marriage.

What emerged out for me from the video is that we are being encouraged to be selfish. More than ever before, the media and the culture is bombarding us with ideas that rights are all that matter and we need to go any distance to grab them. But hardly do we find someone talking about duties. In the garb of empowerment, young women are cajoled into believing that choices are personal and inconsequential. But do choices really stick to our own personal life? Do they not affect the families and societies we are knotted to? If I choose to have an extra- marital affair will that just influence my life or will it break the heart of my wife and the family my daughter was born into? If a young couple decides to have consensual sex and part ways what happens to the child that is born out of that union? Who will take care of that baby? When a father smokes his lungs out and is diagnosed with terminal cancer, is it his choice alone really? Is his family left immune to all pain and loss?

Every decision I make as an individual has a consequence. We are human beings and we are interconnected to one another. The world around me does change in the little small ways based on my choices. Even animal kingdom is an intricate food web. The loss of one species can be a threat to the entire ecology. The malady of self centered choices has already cut down so many forests, industrialized millions of hectares of fertile land, killed hundreds of plant families and endangered many more clans of animals. We have convinced ourselves that human beings have the right to flourish at the cost of other life forms.

The bad infection has now escalated to a more virulent form. Not just other organisms, I am now encouraged to believe that I have the supreme right to survive at the cost of my family and society.

The Christian faith has something to say about choices and its corollaries. Jesus in the book of Luke talks about the famous prodigal son story. The son wants to leave the father with the property he was entitled to. He wanted power. He wanted freedom. He did not want to play a second fiddle to his elder brother. For realizing his dream of a liberated soul, he made the choice to breakdown the family he was born into. The son goes to a foreign land and lives the life his way (the ideal of our age)! He slowly realizes that he has nothing left. He goes back to his dad. The father forgives him and accepts him. In that story it is the family that backs up a son who makes wrong choice.

But I dread a situation when we begin to live based on conveniences and not commitments. What would happen when a couple stay together till they are comfortable and walk away when they hit rough waters. What would happen to the off springs of such families? Who will accept them when they turn prodigal?

 Acceptance is what we need ultimately need not just when we are virtuous but when we commit mistakes.  We need hands that can help, the paths that can be emulated and shoulders to cry on. And I believe it won’t come from a civilization that promotes selfishness as the prime quality that can be strived for.

Choices are to be made. But they have to be made responsibly keeping the world around in mind. My choice may make or break a life around me. I am empowered to see that I have a profound impact on people around. My choices need to come from that sense of duty than from the obsession of self. Only then the world can become a better place. Only then the women who need help and power can have access to them.

Jesus for example lived to fulfill the duty and not to win His rights. He gave up His life for the larger good and did not get tied down to realizing His rights. It is that larger good we must strive for. Only then can the world be a better place.