FREEDOM AND REGULATION

As I sit in my room and keep wandering about, out of the blue comes the question - what is freedom? What does it mean to me as an individual? What are its effects? Here I also present some of my inferences. What is so important about this thing that made it our ancestors to lay their lives for it. So let's begin with what is freedom and what it means to me. To give a concise answer, it means the permission to do what you want as long as it is within your rights and does not interfere with someone else's freedom. Note that I have said permission and not power since you may not have the power to do everything you want. This may not be the most accurate definition but seems the most logical to me as an individual. Now let us put the simplest question to rest. Is it necessary? Without doubt it is. Freedom is the most important right one has. To live without freedom is to not live. Life is meant to be free.

While I was young and at home, I had the freedom to do everything I wanted. Still the thought of what my parents would think of me if I told them that I did something, made me keep my mouth shut. This for me was a regulatory board. Everybody thinks that one does not need such a thing and that such regulatory boards are antithesis of freedom. But as I have come to believe, this is far from the truth. This clicked to me at dinner after I had a chat with one of my childhood friends. We had met after a gap of 7 years and so started talking about our school days and friends. As I gathered from him, most of my friends who were in the same environment at home as I was, turned out okay. But the same cannot be said of those who had either too little regulation or too much of it. Those people who had too much freedom too early in life did not know what to do with it and ended up on the wrong side. While those who had too little freedom got so much of it at a point of time in their lives (read - in college) that they did not know how to handle it. For example, we as a nation had no freedom till 1947 and after we got it, we did not know how to handle it. I remember reading about this in some history book. It said that the English had said that they we prepared to delay the date of independence so that people here could learn. But Gandhi would have none of it.

Say you spit on the road (okay it is a bad example since one can argue that road is not his property so he cannot spit, road is a public property and he is one among the public and not the complete public; but I hope you get the point) and say that you did it because you are free to do what you want. How do you control such a thing? Law and order comes to my mind. One needs to have laws and orders to guard against such things. So some people may say that laws and orders are against freedom? I would like to believe that they are like a regulatory board. And as I have come to discover they are very important in a child's life. Freedom and regulations go hand-in-hand. One without the other will be barbarism (barbarism = an act, trait or custom characterized by ignorance or crudity; words and their meanings huh?).

Want to talk about decisions and decision making, will do that the next time I end up brooding.