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14 August 2004
Saturday, the 14th
I returned this Thursday from a five-week long vacation to India. My first impressions in the early days of my stay was that nothing had changed and yet over the month I awakened to the gradual shift in people's perceptions. In the shopping plazas in Mount Road and Besantnagar, the feel-good factor is copiously evident. The pockets are well-lined amongst the middle-class as it is caught within a temporary bubble between rising wages and slow-to-react prices (at least until last week). Cellphone companies figure prominently amongst the biggest publicity seekers with huge flashlit-hoardings of Dravid (for Hutch) and Tendulkar (for Airtel) sidled on busy roads. The one thing that intrigued me most was the infatuation with celebrities as endorsers -- cricketers endorsing cellphones, Tamil actors endorsing garments and even appalams. But even though consumerism is on the rise, basic conditions have scarcely improved. The cataclysm of water crises later this century is already being played out in India. While Bombay received eight days of unabated rainfall, Uttar Pradesh and Rajasthan are considering appealing to the Centre for drought relief. It has become a habit now for the state governments to beggar the central government for all possible monetary benefit while they themselves fritter it away in cheap populism in the name of free power.Even with all the big talk of growth and opulence does become something of a reality, I wonder if it shall amount to anything. There shall always be an irreconcilable paradox in the steadily widening chasm between the glitzy arcades and the careening water tankers that hundreds of slum-dwellers throng to everyday like litter suckling milk off the emaciated bosoms of their mother. As much as a supporter of civil liberties and democracy as I have always been, I still feel sore about our own experiment in the past fifty years. The franchise we were given has been misused. Nehruvian socialism formulated on the lofty ideals of an effective and benevolent government begot an incorrigible bureaucracy and corruption. We have been betrayed by the very hallmark of our national identity -- our diversity. A lack of homogeneity and common goals meant that within each linguistic cloister, separate causes brewed and gave rise to sporadic political movements that have held the entire country to ransom. Even the experiment to infuse a sense of community and national spirit by way of education failed because education itself was federated to each state. That explains the Dravidian movement in the sixties and the seventies, the Shiv Sena's prejudice against the rising caucus of Tamilians in Chembur and Matunga and the erstwhile Khalistan threat which continues to linger in other forms in Manipur and Kashmir. The lack of a uniformly acceptable definition for Indianness has in turn led to the festering of basic values and morals as each babu in the public works department first looks to furthering his interests. We were ill-equipped for democracy for we did not know what it entails. My thesis is that unless we identify in ourselves a minimum set of common beliefs and values that bind all of us into one nation, we are better off without our civil liberties. Let power be vested in the hands of those that know or think they know what is best for the country. Singapore got it right that way even though it continues to be mocked for the government stranglehold on basic pursuits of joy and titillation such as chewing gum or reading pornography. China is even more off-kilter. So what then is the golden mean?
