Is India Indeed a Civil Society?

As Indians we are known to be very sentimental about our culture and everything that reminds us of our past. Be it visiting religious cities, engaging in massive public baths in river banks or voting fanatically for Taj Mahal to make it one of the wonders of the world, we often go out of our ways to make sure our love for our cultural heritage is known to all.
Having said this, we are also a country which can shamelessly bring down an old monument in Ayodhya and start a politico-religious war which has been on for more than a decade now. It is no surprise then that almost all monuments or places of historic relevance often are at the mercy of people who ill-treat them. People scratching centuries old monuments’ walls and putting down a message for their sweetheart who is going be with someone else the next year is a very common sight.
I happened to visit one of India’s oldest temples in the heart of Tamil Nadu, Brihadeshwar Temple (also known as Big Temple) last week and as much as I awed at the huge embodiment of the faith of people in Lord Shiva, I was irked by the way the visitors have used the walls for their choicest graffiti display. This lame idea of writing on walls of important monuments was perhaps started by the early Bollywood movies but we have come a long way from the old black and white flicks and a neat civil thought needs to be instilled in the minds of these losers.
The same goes with public spitters, urinators, people who ride a polluting vehicle, people who destroy gardens each morning in the name of offering the flowers to their God, etc. There is a need to make people aware that we are a civil society and it’s high time we started behaving like one!