The Campaign

It is not that I have anything personal against US or the people there. I like many things there, like their humor, their movies. I think their wittiness is beyond any comparison. And their film industry offer the best variety I think for any movie lover. They have gems in every genre of movie making. Anyone can pick one for his taste. But something which I cant stand is their arrogance and politicians. I personally feel the only difference between the politicians there and in India is that the ones there wear nice expensive designer suits with a tie and all accompanied by a decent physique. I don't think I need to explain their Indian counterparts. Another thing which sometimes get on my nerves is how they usually blow up things out of proportion, sometimes reaching ridiculous levels. No doubt that they have this blown up mentality of big cars, big houses, big supermarkets etc. But they even tend to take social issues with the same blown up attitude. The latest in line is this KONY 2012 campaign.

I came across this video 2 days back when someone posted it on his wall on Facebook. It was about this guy in Africa who has done atrocities on kids to the levels which can shake anyone's senses. There is no iota of doubt that this Kony is a bad guy and he should be tried in a court of law. There is no discussion about it, that's the bottom line. But what made me write this post was the video. As a first impression, it send out all the right signals. It made me feel angry about what Kony was doing, that he should be stopped at any cost for the sake of innocent children and we, the privileged should do something for this cause even if it is just about spreading the word. And boy, the word is spread. In the last 2 days, I have seen and read about it almost everywhere and it has truly gone viral. There is at least one article on all major mainstream news websites. It is everywhere on Facebook, Youtube is exploding with videos about it, Twitter is going berserk over the issue. But what made me think again was the message in the end asking the people to tell the politicians to send armed forces in Africa to stop this. And here I felt, I need to think about this, again.

You can call me a cynic but just I just do not like to take things taken for granted and like to use a little bit of thinking before going gaga about something. I don't think it hurts anyone to analyze things before just blindly following  the herd.

1. The first thing which struck me when I first saw the video was that it looked too polished, organized and expensive. Such a video coming from a little known charity group seemed a little odd to me. It seemed like it is more of a video from an election campaign which is thoroughly funded.

2. The technologies used and shown in the video made me think twice. Where did they got so much money to implement and use those technologies? Even if they got it from charity, I feel that there are many other more urgent causes to work and spend money on rather than on catching a guy who has shown no sign of life in the last 5 years or so.

3. The level of sophistication with which such technologies are merged with social media websites does not seem ordinary to me. Each time it makes me think, who is paying for all this specially to a charity whose name was hardly heard of before this video.

So, all I meant was that the cause to fight for is good. But the intentions behind it is still not 100% clear to me. Even the local people seem to have some hesitation about this whole thing. Sending troops now to Africa for someone who has not been heard of since many years does not make much sense to me. Specially when the country is in a state where it has enough problems on its own land. This thing being one of the major ones. After what happened in Afghanistan and Iraq, sending troops to Africa seems like getting a little bit overboard to me.

Or maybe it is just me, panicking !

P.S: I wanted to write about Greg Smith today (something more for my taste) but I also felt like getting off this Kony thing from my head.