Idealism Vs Realism!

If today, someone was to ask me, what is your biggest " Regret " in life? And the only answer I have is that my pursuit of Idealism.

What naked eyes see is the realism. What the mind forces you to enact is the Idealism. Somehow, it is only after the age of 40, when you actually start realizing that the acts of idealism was more of story telling and feeling of heroism. Factually, life was quite far from the idealistic stage. Nothing in fact in nature follows the path of idealism.

If you have been brought up with idealistic values, gone to good public school and have a culture that reflects the sensitivity of your surroundings , then you are into the trap of " Idealism" and continuously fight conflicts in your mind.

Third world, where I spent most of my life is torn with shameless corruption, cheating, insensitivity , religious intolerance, black marketing, tax avoidance, incompetence, nepotism, and the list can go on and on.

In such an environment, if one is idealistic, then he perhaps has to only spent most of his life fighting the system . On the other hand, we with this idealistic brought up are such a victim of the system that it has made us impotent and cowards.

None of us has the strength to challenge the dirty business around us . Only for good order sake and to mind our own business, we have tolerated this nonsense for so long. However, this indifference has made the system brutally corrupt. I lately met a bureaucrat who had amassed a wealth of USD 20 Million plus and was searching for place to park his money.

The last sight, which repeatedly comes to my eyes is when I saw a very old man selling newspapers on a street corner to earn his livelihood and around the same corner, a cop, who stopped motorbikes and collected cash for some fault or other.

Here is a state of things, when an idealistic person in an old age is earning his livelihood by selling newspapers and a well paid cop is earning extra income from illegal collections.

Step in any office in most third world countries and you will find that the population has simply resigned to the fact that without illegal payments, they cannot get across with their legal rights.

Will it take another revolution for this autocratic corrupt bureaucracy to be wiped out.