On Tue, Mar 27, 2012 at 6:50 PM, ss <[email protected]> wrote: > The former conforms to dharma, the latter is adharma.
The many liberated Communist states have their favorite coping phrases to describe their transition to a market economy and its effect on society. When human and economic dreams soared and crashed unpredictably, and when the emptiness of communism was replaced by the emptiness of capitalism. When chaos prevailed. India went through an even greater transition in the last 70 some independent years, second only to the Chinese cultural revolution, and yet it's gone unnoticed. Like the silent killer of the night, inconspicuous yet deadly. Under the literate tradition of Raja Ram Mohan Roy and later the Nehru - Gandhi dynasty, a cultural and western educated elite operating presumably centuries ahead in their thought than their obedient compatriots, three hundred million people used to an alien hand on the leash, allowed themselves to be led. India leaped from a classical age of temples, society, rituals, castes and traditions headlong into the bureaucratic equality and rationed guarantees of socialism and then the shunned embraces of market capitalism. For a vocal democracy capable of great bloodshed this was a rather boring bureaucratic revolution. With India's historical disdain for the humanities, neither historian nor sociologist was around to fully record or explain the scale of the destruction. And thus, inside the heads of most upwardly mobile urban Indians today there's a very poorly formed sense of society and family, and an even less formed sense of self. Since the revolution was never announced other than as a fait accompli, most Indians never fully grasped the enormity of the change, nor of the havoc it was going to wreak on family, hearth and home. One look at the classics will tell you that it was a sin against tradition to cross the oceans, or travel other than when forced by trade or religion. Thus as a classical society India has always been ill prepared to deal with personal mobility. In the socialist years, if you moved across the country it was usually for a government job, and the State played parent and guardian to its favorite sons, if it willed them back and forth across hill, valley and plain it also offered useful excuses and lodgings that preserved morality. There was a fatalistic appeal that this held to the Hindu traditions, if the master willed, who was the servant to object after all. Yet when the capitalist chapter began Indian society didn't really have any of the tools to deal with the consequent personal mobility, not even the helpful fatalistic attitude. After all it is clear that personal decisions are being made here. The personal sphere that has remained silent for millennia in Indian society, a slave to the family and society is now unlocked, and instead of fighting the forces that caused it to be liberated - and of what use would that be, the enemy is invisible and long gone - the Indians fight each other. Father against son, family against freedoms, ambition against tradition. Dharma vs adharma is phrasing it unhelpfully. India needs to learn to cope as a nation with this new balance of the personal, the familial and the social. Sadly there isn't any conscious public debate of any significance, nor is it feasible any more to lead by the leash. So it plays out in a billion internecine conflicts and clashes. As the Americans say, it will get worse before it gets better. Cheeni
