Is too much Music and Dance making us stupid?

I have been working on an article for local newspapers which I have tentatively titled as ‘Is too much Music and Dance making us stupid?’ It is a difficult piece to write. There are pieces of thoughts scattered all around and I haven’t been able to put them down coherently just yet. The State Hornbill Festival had just finished and Christmas is round the corner. So, it is a good time to get it out soon.

In this article, I’d like to give a critique of how the present generation is fixated to music and other forms of entertainments which I believe is distracting us from being aware of the more pressing issues in the society. In this information age when what’s happening in a distant land can be known here and now as it unfolds, second by second, and there is a flood of information in the net which is just clicks away; there is also a form of ignorance which is pandemic: We have missed out on the basics of education. So many of our students can’t write or speak basic sentences. They use SMS text formats to cover up. So many students do not have basic grammar knowledge and they commit silly spelling mistakes. While they are aware of the latest twists and turns in the private lives of Hollywood celebrities, they are ignorant of their neighbors living next door. In a recently conducted entrance exam where students from Class 10+2 and above appeared, many of them do not know how to construct sentences with words like Envelop, Principal, Deed, and so on. Only 9 out of 46 students in one room got it right that there are 66 books in the Bible. Some even don’t know how many districts are there in Nagaland, or which town the District Headquarter of Peren is. With computers and the internet, we have lost the art of reading comics, magazines and books. Besides the academic text books I wonder how many of our students read.

We live in an age of quick fixes and instant gratification. We need to be entertained 24x7 lest we die of boredom. Chris Hedges says that celebrity culture is so pervasive that one is made to feel as if one is living in a movie in which one is the main star. Or that life is one big reality show. Celebrities are projected as the ultimate objects of desire and that anyone can achieve that status. We live in this make-believe world and mistake it to be the real.

Nagas have become attracted to neon lights and their lives are becoming plastic. The State has so much bought into celebrity culture and the present government blatantly promotes and sponsors immoral behaviors that come with it. The leaders may wash off their hands saying morality is an individual’s choice. But how many young lives are going down because of the governments’ decisions? The Church also remains a mute spectator and sometimes even wallows in its own sin. The moral cost of such State Sponsored indulgence week as the Hornbill Festival needs to be counted. The festival per se may be a good thing. But there need to be an ‘enough’; some kind of regulation and limit. If there is a moral scale to gauge governments, I’m sure the present one wouldn’t score very high. Chances are it may go down in history as the most immoral ever. And as the German churches during the Nazi rule, the present Naga churches too may go down as the generation which didn’t speak out in the face of evil, but even colluded with it.

Recommendations: (will expound later)
1. Solitude
2. Moderation
3. Habit of reading

Your inputs please