*What’s Ailing Us: A Nation at War With Its Own Civility* *ANIL TALWAR* *SEP 14, 2025* We’ve ...

*What’s Ailing Us: A Nation at War With Its Own Civility* *ANIL TALWAR* *SEP 14, 2025* We’ve built a country that reflects us too well.. *chaotic, careless, and always looking for someone else to blame.* We travel to paradise and leave it looking like a landfill. *What’s Ailing Us*: A Nation at War With Its Own Civility We love to complain. About potholes, garbage, public transport, pollution, corruption, the full spectrum. But scratch the surface, and you’ll see, *the rot is within.* We’re a nation perpetually demanding better amenities while shamelessly vandalising the ones we already have. *Spitting on walls, littering streets, jumping queues, blasting horns, bribing officials, all while claiming victimhood.* *We are, quite plainly, lacking in civic sense, public manners, and basic courtesy.* And it’s not poverty that breeds this, it’s mindset. *The rich do it with tinted glass and entitlement. The poor do it with resignation.* Somewhere along the way, the very idea of public good became someone else’s responsibility. We treat public spaces like dumping grounds and private ones like shrines. We demand *Swachh Bharat* but won’t walk ten steps to find a dustbin. What’s happened to us? There’s no national pride. No shared sense of ownership. *Just hyper-nationalism that ignites during cricket matches and dies at the sight of a red light.* - Character has been replaced by convenience. - Discipline by jugaad. Accountability by blame. We want first-world cities but *we have third-class habits,* we have glass buildings with garbage strewn streets outside. - Look at how we drive. - How we talk to service staff. - How we treat and behave with women in public spaces and at home. - How we protest, - How we celebrate, - How we fight online. It’s all noise and no nuance. Volume over value. Rights over responsibility. This isn’t just a governance failure. *This is a cultural and moral collapse.* We’ve become a nation of people disconnected from consequences, addicted to shortcuts, and allergic to introspection. *Even as tourists,* we carry this carelessness like luggage. We visit pristine mountains, beaches, forests and leave behind a mountain of trash, plastic bottles, wrappers, broken respect. We turn beauty into burden, treating nature as a backdrop for selfies, not as a sacred place to preserve. India doesn’t just need better roads or cleaner trains. *INDIA NEEDS A CIVIC RESET. A rebirth of manners, public discipline, shared responsibility and, most importantly, self-respect.* Until then, we’re not just uncivil. We’re unserious. And no nation becomes great by accident. *The mark of a civilised nation is not how loud it shouts at its leaders, but how quietly it respects what belongs to everyone.*