The Second Jallianwala Baug
Several years ago when I first moved abroad one of my work colleagues joked that direction a train in India is traveling can be determined by which way the people on the roof of the train are facing. It was an innocuous joke but one that left me very hurt.
"How could people still think of India as a land of snake charmers and uncouth barbarians?" I thought to myself "Have they not heard about the progress being made in one of the top 4 developing economies? Give us another 10 years and our overall image in the rest of the world will improve in line with our economic progress".
It's fair to say that India has changed in the last 10 yrs but in my opinion lot of the changes have been divisive and degenerative.
Simply measuring up a nation on the economic scale was my folly - I took the positive elements of our culture, heritage and social diversity and clubbed it with the economic growth we were experiencing to paint a rosy picture about the shining nation!
Things that I thought were our strength have been sadly exposed as nothing more than a mirage. Economic growth unfortunately has exposed our ugly underbelly ruthlessly and definitively. We have behaved as uncouth barbarians - typified by a complete lack of pride, zero sense of identity and total moral hopelessness.
Take for example the large scale sexual violence against our wives, daughters, sisters and mothers. Gender based inequality has been around not only in India but in others parts of the world for several generations but what we are experiencing in our cities and villages today reflects the moral depravity of our society. Each and every parent and stakeholder of society is responsible for each and every rape taking place in our houses, on our streets and in our buses.
Every father and mother, brother and sister failing to orient their family to protect the vulnerable is culpable. Every actor and actress doing the next item number in movies is laying the foundation of another rape somewhere in the country. Every journalist, judge, policeman and politician writing irresponsibly or not taking action is ensuring that another beautiful soul would be lost forever soon.
Take the tragedy of Sarabjeet Singh. I think that prisoners did him a favor by liberating him of a life made wretched by those who should have protected him. The Indian government has rained bricks on him every day for the past 22 years. Our politicians are worst than the people who took his life. They did not line up to secure his release but were first in line to receive his coffin. A brief frisking at a foreign airport is enough to humiliate our esteemed politicians but is the sight of coffin or headless soldier humiliating enough for them? Ultimately we are responsible for electing these goons to offices they do not deserve. We are complicit and cannot dissociate ourselves from the sad state of governance.
Take the case of our treatment of the minorities. The victims of the 1984 riots suffer while those responsible are still protected by the law and the government. If a Sikh prime minister cannot secure fairness to his own community what chance do we really have?
Take the case of the billions embezzled in various schemes in the name of growth. From coal to telecoms to aviation to infrastructure. Put a finger on any part of the economy and a stench of ill gotten gain rises from it. We point fingers as the collusion between politics and business but is the problem really external to us?We are the politician and businessmen - we are the doctors and educators - we are the police and armed forces. We are kidding ourselves if we continue to think that the problem is "out there".
For centuries we have convinced ourselves by "externalizing our problems" - whether it was the "Raj" or our "neighbors"; whether is caste system or reservations we have consistently relieved ourselves of the guilt.
Wake up and seize what is rightfully ours. We need our own second jallianwala baug and do away with the symbols of weakness in our society. We have it in us but will we rise? Will we vote out those that make us corrupt - will we punish those among us that make us morally deprave - will we find the courage to protect the next vulnerable victim? Or will we cloak ourselves in silence and trudge along as miserable and helpless people that we have become. Our choices today will dictate our identity of our tomorrow.
Vande Mataram - may the force be with you!
"How could people still think of India as a land of snake charmers and uncouth barbarians?" I thought to myself "Have they not heard about the progress being made in one of the top 4 developing economies? Give us another 10 years and our overall image in the rest of the world will improve in line with our economic progress".
It's fair to say that India has changed in the last 10 yrs but in my opinion lot of the changes have been divisive and degenerative.
Simply measuring up a nation on the economic scale was my folly - I took the positive elements of our culture, heritage and social diversity and clubbed it with the economic growth we were experiencing to paint a rosy picture about the shining nation!
Things that I thought were our strength have been sadly exposed as nothing more than a mirage. Economic growth unfortunately has exposed our ugly underbelly ruthlessly and definitively. We have behaved as uncouth barbarians - typified by a complete lack of pride, zero sense of identity and total moral hopelessness.
Take for example the large scale sexual violence against our wives, daughters, sisters and mothers. Gender based inequality has been around not only in India but in others parts of the world for several generations but what we are experiencing in our cities and villages today reflects the moral depravity of our society. Each and every parent and stakeholder of society is responsible for each and every rape taking place in our houses, on our streets and in our buses.
Every father and mother, brother and sister failing to orient their family to protect the vulnerable is culpable. Every actor and actress doing the next item number in movies is laying the foundation of another rape somewhere in the country. Every journalist, judge, policeman and politician writing irresponsibly or not taking action is ensuring that another beautiful soul would be lost forever soon.
Take the tragedy of Sarabjeet Singh. I think that prisoners did him a favor by liberating him of a life made wretched by those who should have protected him. The Indian government has rained bricks on him every day for the past 22 years. Our politicians are worst than the people who took his life. They did not line up to secure his release but were first in line to receive his coffin. A brief frisking at a foreign airport is enough to humiliate our esteemed politicians but is the sight of coffin or headless soldier humiliating enough for them? Ultimately we are responsible for electing these goons to offices they do not deserve. We are complicit and cannot dissociate ourselves from the sad state of governance.
Take the case of our treatment of the minorities. The victims of the 1984 riots suffer while those responsible are still protected by the law and the government. If a Sikh prime minister cannot secure fairness to his own community what chance do we really have?
Take the case of the billions embezzled in various schemes in the name of growth. From coal to telecoms to aviation to infrastructure. Put a finger on any part of the economy and a stench of ill gotten gain rises from it. We point fingers as the collusion between politics and business but is the problem really external to us?We are the politician and businessmen - we are the doctors and educators - we are the police and armed forces. We are kidding ourselves if we continue to think that the problem is "out there".
For centuries we have convinced ourselves by "externalizing our problems" - whether it was the "Raj" or our "neighbors"; whether is caste system or reservations we have consistently relieved ourselves of the guilt.
Wake up and seize what is rightfully ours. We need our own second jallianwala baug and do away with the symbols of weakness in our society. We have it in us but will we rise? Will we vote out those that make us corrupt - will we punish those among us that make us morally deprave - will we find the courage to protect the next vulnerable victim? Or will we cloak ourselves in silence and trudge along as miserable and helpless people that we have become. Our choices today will dictate our identity of our tomorrow.
Vande Mataram - may the force be with you!
Dear Deepak
ReplyDeleteSince I really started using Google+ only today, I have just started reading what everybody has published.
I just finished with your NAMO article and since I love the way you have written (what less can I expect from the topper of our batch), I looked for another article. Sure enough, there is this one that reflects the thoughts of many an Indian.
Vivekananda wrote extensively about the future of India but in his last days he said something to the effect of - we can only start the change and cannot hope to witness the effects of that change. It is this philosophy that I believe in and I would love to see everyone trying to make small changes to effect a large cumulative positive change.
I witnessed the 1984 riots first hand, it changed my perception of humanity overnight. I cannot understand, to this day, why the perpetrators were not brought to justice. But then I cannot understand how Lalu Prasad Yadav can roam free and be invited to a prestigious business school in America as guest lecturer. I cannot understand why the Indian judicial system treats people like Salman Khan deferentially in the drunk-drive-kill case but sternly when he is accused of killing a nilgai. Are the lives of a few people less valuable that that of a rare deer? Is it because the people who died on that footpath under his car were poor?
Rules are not the same for everyone. I understand this today after having lived on the other side of the world relative to where I grew up for a good part of my adult life. They never were, they never will be. If we can find a way to level the playing field a little for the disadvantaged, we will do an iota of good every once in a while. The trick is to keep doing this and look for opportunities to carry this on. We will not live to witness the effects.......