Ram Dhar wrote ----------------------------------------------
I stepped out of the muggy afternoon of a July monsoon day into the air-conditioned sparkle of the newest, the DT mall. The lines were forming at the multiplex while shoppers moved up escalators from a sari store to a Benetton outlet. The menu at Ruby Tuesday's offered everything from ribs to chicken tikka.
Where are we?
``I'm not in India,'' my driver declared, wide-eyed, as he looked around. Maybe not. Let's call this place Globoworld.
Globoworld is where India's new middle class lives. These are the 20-something kids in blue jeans and T-shirts who work >all night in nearby call centers, talking to folks in Des Moines about their credit card bills. Or the Indian managers who >run the offices of the multi-national companies that have set up branches in this suburban boom town. They are shopping>for shoes at Lifestyle, the mall's three-floor anchor store, or grabbing a chicken sandwich at the McDonald's in the mall >across the road.-----------------------------------------------------------------
Gandhi decided to study law in England at a pretty young age; a very "irreligious", almost heretic, and unprecedented act in those days and esp in his casteist Gujarati community. But once he reached Southampton, he was in a state of stupor for the first part of his stay: the beauty and the charms of London were lost on him; he registered nothing of the Shavian plays that were being enacted nor any mention of the surroundings or the attitudes of the people is made in his " My experiments with Truth". It is important to note that he himself admits to his stupefaction when he first reached England. An Indian during those days, and in a pretty large number of cases even now, was not an individual with indiviual emotions and responses to external impressions. He was a member of a group: HIS group, with his pre-defined boundaries of caste, class, religion and acceptable behaviour. His reactions to everything that he came to contact with were pre-determined by his background and he accepted it without question. But when Gandhi reached England, his tidy fortress of religious beliefs and caste mannerisms was suddenly in ruins. He suddenly found the world he was in didnot run according to the terms dictated by the age old traditions of his merchant Gujarati community. THAT is the reason for his initial stupor.
But then Gandhi delves into his soul, into his values, to keep his indentity as a Hindu intact, to shield his "divine soul" from the infectious foreign influences of meat, wine and women. An escape from the reality: a retreat from the active world into the inner fortications of his souls. Yes, ironically the foreign influences made Gandhi a stronger Hindu Gujarati himself. He no longer believed in his ideals blindly, he figured out reasons to believe in what he did.
It is actually the very reason why he didnot register any of the charms of the land "where the sun never set". He had this limited view of England, his own hindu view of how England was: a racist, vulgar and fobbish country and whatever he saw in London were interpreted by this biased view. He was, in effect, blind to everything else.
Ram Dhar in his essay sees a bright vision of India. India which is ready to break free, in a single brilliant stroke of economic policy, from the fetters that are thousands of years old . The vision is different from Gandhi, who glorified the poor and converted poverty into the great Hindu ideal of austerity; but the defect in vision still is the same, the "blinker"-ed vision which handicapped Gandhi still persists.
Mr. Dhar sees india as he wishes to see it, away from her thousands of years of ravage first by the aryans, then by mughals, and finally by the British. If we look at history carefully we can soon deduce that most parts of India were not independent for thousands of years till 1947 ! When we talk of India we cannot isolate her from her history: 56 years of independence is a very small time when compared to her thouands of years old history. The Indian machinery didnot start in 1947, it started with the Indus valley civilisation and it was sledge-hammered and rammed till 1947 when Indians came to learn about liberty. But liberty itself is a dangerous weapon in the hands of those who have been subjugated for long, just for the simple reason that they donot know how to use it.
Right now, to quote Naipaul, "India is a land of million mutinies". Every man is a mutiny against the age-old values of age-old India. We are experimenting new things, we are open to outside infulence and it is actually a very good thing to happen. The air-conditioned mall and chicken sandwiches at McDonald's that Ram Dhar speaks of are examples of this very mutiny that Naipaul speaks of. But is it possible, may be, that India is going for a Gandhi-like stupor? Is it actually a journey towards an eastern America or is it a journey at the end of which we will have to redefine what we mean by India and go back to our tidy little fortress of Indian values (not very unlike what the Japanese did not very long ago) ??
If we look at Gurgaon and Mumbai and say India has modernised, we will be terribly wrong; Gurgaon and Mumbai doesnot define India. The India where 14 yr. old girls are sold for 12,000 rupees is not the place where people will eat 60 rupees hamburgers or 300 rupees pizzas. To match technology and "modern amenities" to the needs of a country like India, where people are used to leading their lives by instinct and without thinking, one needs the clearest of visions.
We are not modern yet: we are not yet living in "GLOBOWORLD". We are a newly independent nation and are at crossroads. What India is doing right now is experimenting with the different impressions from all over the world in different fields. This is not the final stage, it is the beginning. What we think that wont work (something like the Enron power project sometime back) we will readily discard. The progress of a country is not the standard of its upper class citizens. It is the standard of its average population and the average PCI has hardly improved much. Mayb be we donot feel it at the heat of the moment, but all India is doing is experimenting. ONLY. Some of the things introduced will work and some will not and it is only by trail and error, only after a few generations of experimentations we will know what India really is. What India has to do is to keep its Indian-ness(not that I am championing the research of newly designed bullock-carts!) and incorporate the amenities and ideals of the western world as far as our Indian attitude and our past will allow us to. As a result of our generations of subjugation, we have imbibed the habit of seeking approval from the so-called modernised countries/ races. We are simply like kids seeking approval from elders. India will be truly modern when she starts believeing in herself and what she does. Establishment of call-centers in India is not something to be very proud of unlike Mr. Dhar pointed out. Talking to people somewhere in Europe/ America about credit card debts is not the epitome of success: it is a highly unskilled job: I have myself come into contact with some high school dropouts who are excellent tele-marketeers.
But until we believe in ourselves and stop being elated everytime we come into contact with or do something similar to what the Western man does, India will still be the same. In the same edition of "Outlook" that Mr. Dhar quotes while talking about the advancement of India, there is an essay on the cow written by a future administrator of India copied below..
"The Telegraph got a copy of a UPSC candidate�s essay on the topic, The Indian Cow: "The cow is a successful animal. Also he is quadrupud and because he is female, he give milk, but will do so when he is got child. He is same like God, sacred to Hindus and useful to man. But he has got four legs together. Two are forward and two are afterwards. His whole body can be utilised for use. More so the milk. What cant it do? Various ghee, butter, cream, curd, why and the condensed milk and so forth. Also he is useful to cobbler, watermans and makinds generally. "Cow is the only animal that extricates his feeding after eating. He is incessantly in the meadows in the rass. His only attacking and defending organ is the horn, specially so when he is got child. He causes the weapons to be paralleled to the ground of the earth and instantly proceed with great velocity forwards. He has got tail also but not like simila animals. It has hairs on the othr end of the other side. This is done to frigthen away the flies which alight on his body wherupon he gives hit with it. The palms of his feet are soft unto the touched.This is the cow." The daily says they "were informed that the candidate passed the exam". "
Syamanta Saikia
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