HEAR OUT

On Saturday, Video Volunteers organised a viewing of the weekend community news show, on NewsX channel ‘Speak Out India’. It includes inputs from ‘India Unheard’ - an initiative (by filmmaker Stalin K Padma & Jessica Maybeery) to empower voices that get eclipsed in the mainstream media. One input by community correspondent, Devidas Gaokar showed farmer Rama Velip speak out whilst standing in the mess created by mining in his field.

Hopefully, the video will be viewed across Goa. Hopefully it will facilitate a better grasp of an irreversible destruction of Goa’s fields, forests and water bodies. Hopefully it will provoke a proactive resistance to the ones who commit the crippling crime as well as those who aid them by supportive acts of omission and commission or by plain indifference.

The word ‘hopefully’ gets into every statement as Rama, Devidas, Seby and others have been speaking out for so many years, but in vain. They have been backing what they say with evidence, yet they are voices unheard. And if and when they are heard, they go unheeded. And if and when they are heeded, they are bypassed by flawed logic of greed masquerading as need!

So many voices go unheard due to our insensitivity, if not complicity. Surely our world would be better if for every person that needs to speak out, there is someone who will hear out, sincerely. This sincerity is to be measured not just by the attention we pay to one speaking out but the aligned actions that we undertake. We need to own up to the reality that we are either part of the solution or part of the problem… even the ones that are unheard, because the onus is on us to hear out!

May we BE BETTER at heeding the unheard situation…

By first hearing out and then responding with apt action!

- Pravin K. Sabnis