Tanmoy has some real good suggestions for us. Terror attack in Mumbai has left us all dazed and shaken. But this time it will be good if we don’t move on and pretend if nothing has happened.
What is community service? What to my mind we can do instantaneously?
First, ask ourselves do we know how to fight an emergency / crisis situations ourselves? If the answer is no, let’s ask ourselves what can the emergency situations be. Fire in our apartment, may be! If we don’t know how to fight fire, do we know, if we write a letter to the nearest fire station, they will come and teach us some of the basic things.
People in fire service and police service often tend to feel that none cares for them unless one is affected. This can be a good exercise perhaps to get them involved.
Can anyone of us amongst ourselves take the responsibility of doing that for our own colony, apartment back in India?
Get yourself trained without really relying on tacit intelligence (we are tremendously over confident, I know!) and importantly help the women and children in our family / colony to get trained.
Secondly, can we start telling our children about our savings and teach them banking operations. In West, all children after the age of 10 tend to know about such things. We seem to protect themselves till eternity.
Thirdly, can we as a community go to the “lazy” police station across the street and tell them that we are scared. I know many of you loathe such police officials but trust me the feeling is mutual. They loathe you too but we must not assume they are utterly rubbish and stop involving them. If we make police / firemen a part of our community, after sometime they would become conscious of their existence too. We have to give them confidence, that we trust them. How many of us invite these people to our community functions? We don’t but why is that so?Fourthly, can we be aware of things like Right to Information Act, Consumer Court, Public Grievance System in Government, Directorate of Public Grievances and many such organizations.
Fifthly, have a diary at home where emergency numbers are stored. I am sure most of our mobile phones don’t have them and same is for our family members. Why is that so? How long shall be inflict wounds on our families because of our callous attitude.Sixthly, how many us have ever planted a tree or have helped someone to plant one?