It is India's 64th Independence Day today and I take this opportunity to wish all Indians living in India or abroad a very happy Independence Day. While you celebrate, also look back over your shoulder and see what the last 100+ years have been for India. Please see the sacrifices upon which the nation and the country have been built. Please pay homage to those martyrs who gave up their lives so that we their progeny can leave in freedom, peace and happiness. Please realize the importance of freedom and peace that we as people of this country enjoy and don't take them for granted. These were not always available to the people of this great nation. I know I am sounding pontifical but there is a reason behind that.
When I was a student of B.A at the Nizam College in the 1980s, one of the subject I studied was English Literature. In those days the first year of B.A had poetry as the paper to be studied and one of the poems that we were supposed to study was "Lines written a few miles above the Tintern Abbey" by Wordsworth. I am not quoting this to get into an argument of the quality of Wordsworth's writing but to illustrate a poignant point he made in this poem. We have always been taught that William Wordsworth was Romantic who wrote poems about nature. It took me many years to realize the true import of the word Romanticism and the meanings that it threw up. It was then that I understood what exactly the great poet meant when he wrote "behind all this beauty, I can hear the still sad music of humanity". Brilliant man this Wordsworth. He describes the beauty of nature as seen from a few miles over the Tintern Abbey, but tells us that behind the beauty is a sadness.
Today when I look at my beloved country I have very similar feeling. It is undoubtedly a great country with an enviable past, a country that gave a form of mathematics that defies imagination; I see a country that saw many great cultures flourish due to its openness and ability to embrace anything and everything. The other day I read a piece written by an Chief Justice of the Indian Supreme Court in the Hindu. Please treat the other day as a Hyderabadi would. It could be anything from the day before yesterday to the year before last. This must have been some months ago. I apologize for not remembering the name of the said person but he was someone from the not so recent past as far as Chief Justices of the Indian Supreme Court go. After his retirement this man had taken it upon himself to research deeply into India's past and he came up with the conclusion that India centuries ago was what America is today. I humbly request you to not jump to the conclusion that I am arguing that India is better than America since it was many centuries ago what the latter is today. This conclusion is simply this. America is today home to so many people of different cultural backgrounds and is still the destination of many people the world over, Indians included (I do not think the downgrading of America's creditworthiness by Standard and Poor will change the aspirations of going and living there, especially for Indians and people from Andhra Pradesh). What the writer was saying is that people from all over the world came to India and made it their home and even more remarkably they forgot their original homes. The Parsis in India and the Muslims are a prime example of this.
Now look at the identity called Indian. When someone says I am Indian we don't know what his/her religion is straightaway, we do not know what language is her/his mother tongue, we do not know which region of the country she/he belong to. What we know is that this person is Indian even if she/he speaks a language, or practices a religion which is different from what many others do. That is truly the most remarkable thing about India and being Indian. I know some cynics will chip in with an argument that you can make out a person's region, language and religion on the basis of their features and their attire. That maybe true in some instances but not in all. Take me for example. I am today a Telugu speaking Indian from Hyderabad. Yet at one time the family on my father's side were Kannada speaking people who came to the Warangal region more than a century ago and today very few people in my extended family speak Kannada. My mother's family were originally Kannada speaking people who later became Marathi speaking people and finally Telugu speaking people. When people look at my dad, they say they cannot make out which region he is from or what his native tongue is. When people look at me they see a Punjabi and are usually shocked to learn that I am a Telugu. My wife is half Bengali (father) and half British (mother). When people look at her they think that she is Malayalee, some have thought that she is Muslim, others just say she does not look like anyone in particular. But when her parentage is revealed people are surprised; they say she does not look either like a Bengali or like a Britisher. The point is while some can be identified as what they are, others cannot be. In either case the identity which is primary is Indian.
Time for me to tell you why I feel like Wordsworth did when he wrote the poem Tintern Abbey. Just as he heard the sad music of humanity behind all the natural beauty that he was seeing, I too hear a sad music when I see what my country is today. The beauty, grandeur and openness are all there but there is that sad music too. Perhaps if we had heeded what the great Mahatma Gandhi said, this country would have been a better place. India lives in its villages, said the great man. He wanted Indians to lead a life of simplicity, austerity so that everyone could share everything. He called that Trusteeship. After the attainment of Independence we killed the great man and along with him his ideals and wisdom. The same man that was venerated the world over is now seen as a joke by his own country people. The very people who were recipients of his services today disown him. We killed him and his legacy. With the vanishing of the great freedom fighting generation, we have seen the waning of the great emotions and philosophy that were espoused by that generation.
That generation wanted us to be united and live in freedom, peace and prosperity. But what do we do today? We divide ourselves on every possible lines. North vs South, East vs West, Hindi vs Non Hindi, Hindu vs Muslim, Aryan vs Dravidian, Fair skin vs Dark skin, Upper Caste vs Lower Caste, Sub caste vs Sub caste, and any other thing that one can think of. We are nation that is increasingly seeing cracks and schisms appearing among us. Some of them have already become fragments. Why is this happening? This has everything to do with our politicians. Wily, greedy and with the motive to serve themselves at any cost they have and continue to play with the emotions of the people. In one of my previous posts I have said that the British probably did not divide us. We were divided already, they just exploited the divisions. During the freedom movement great people like the Mahatma bridged the divides but once the event was over we are lapsing back to our divisive ways.
The caste system in India is one of the main reasons behind why the nation is always so ready to divide itself. The caste system is not a product of the ancient order that the cosmology of many thousands of years ago. It is the chicanery of Brahmins who perpetuated this for purposes of power. Gandhi was right when he said what "Sanatana Dharma" stood for was different from what he called "Brahminical Religion". From this schism emanate every other schisms. Caste system has now found its way into Sikhism, Islam and Christianity. Our politicians have exploited these divisions to their advantages. They have also carefully created and are still creating newer schisms to ensure that they remain relevant. Political leadership now strategises politics as companies would markets. The other very important thing is the uneven distribution of primary social goods (I have borrowed that phrase from John Rawls). Primary social goods are access to good and quality education, nutritious food, a comfortable and clean environment and hygiene. These are not properly distributed leading to the dis-empowering of entire communities. India today does not have the problem of unemployment. It has the problem of unemployability. There are legions of people who are armed with useless degrees. Useless, because while the student has been given a degree she/he has been taught nothing. The academic mafiosi have for years concealed their incompetence by routinely passing students who did not deserve to pass. India has jobs and people looking for jobs but not having the competencies that those jobs require. We are creating paradoxes such as these.
The middle classes are quite happy and contented to ape the West. Reality for them is the number of outlets of Kentucky Fried Chicken or McDonalds in their city, the number of pubs that are there for spending their disposable incomes, the number of stores that sell Levis, Lee and Wrangler jeans, and the number of posh hotels like Westin, Novotel and the Marriot. Some friends have created their own index of development. A city's development and haute culture are to be measured in terms of the number of women who are willing to expose their skin. The Indian middle class has been irresponsible. It has forgotten to see the number of people who are going without education, nutrition and hygienic environment. We are creating enclaves of prosperity that are surrounded by slums caught in abject poverty. This if not remedied through appropriate measures will in conjunction with the schisms originally created by Brahminical Religion will bring down the nation. It is for the middle classes and the rich to right the wrongs. It is time to share the primary social goods and lend a helping him to those who need it. It is time to remember what Gandhi said. There is enough in this world for every man's need but not for every man's greed. Let us understand the divisive strategies of our politicians and discard them, for they build feeling of antipathy towards our own countrymen. Let us pledge to throw out that teacher who is uneducated, throw out the corrupt and dirty politician, throw out the casteist, throw out all those who foment religious intolerance and hatred; let us forge a nation yet again built on equality, solidarity, love, compassion and humanity. Jai Hind.
P.S: Have not proof read. Please excuse errors of syntax, semantics and spelling. They are inadvertent.
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