Ever since Rousseau’s cry ‘man is born free but is in
chains everywhere’ there has been an insatiable search for the rights of man.
From Thomas Paine’s ‘Rights of Man’ to Feminist movements to the Rights of
LGBTQ communities, we are eternally looking for increasing the ambit of rights.
There is always a talk of securing the rights of the people from children, to
women to everyone considered to be hitherto marginalized. The focus is on
getting your voice counted or heard, there appears to be a continuous noise
regarding lost rights or suppression of rights, in the midst of it all we seem
to have forgotten about the other part of the binary: duties. Every social
platform shrieks about rights not realized, yet there seems to be a negligible
focus on neglect of duties by us as human beings, as a child, as a parent , as
a student, as a teacher, as an employer, as an employee or even as a citizen.
Duties seem to be the lost part of this binary, only
because the onus lies on individuals and there is no agency involved in
enforcing the duties being carried out by people. It is only a part of moral
attributes and can easily be ignored.
