The Old Woes and Wounds of India

When it comes to dealing with any Indian problem, the general

tendency that comes to the readers’ collective mind is to wail,
whine and wriggle silently for a while with bitter pain during
reading and discussing it. Then you know well that people soon
forget it because, as is popularly known, people have short
memories; and the present day hurries and worries made these
memories awfully shorter and shorter just like Amir Khan’s in
‘Ghulam’. This gradual fossilization of minds and hearts can lead
to disastrous circumstances when it would be too late. So, do not
wait too much before you act, else you would become another
Hamlet who kept on waiting listlessly to revenge his foster father
but was himself killed by him at last. The modern Indians should
not become ‘rigid iron-men’ in the Indian cactus land.
Nearly all the Indians know the old Indian wounds and woes that
keep on festering despite periodic changes in regimes at state
and central levels: only the faces of the Indian rulers change but
not the modus operandi of most of the Indian people and their
manners. The wounds are now spreading fast, disturbing
gradually nearly every aspect of the Indian public life. We keep on
getting updates from news channels and newspapers and make
our talk of different disconcerting news and issues stand on their
own staggering feet but unfortunately we can’t walk them due to
lack of confidencein ourselves. Different Hindi movies like
‘Krantiveer’ have depicted such typical Indian scenarios
ferociously but to no significant effect. We are so engrossed in the
mad pursuit of bread and butter as well as beckoning comforts
that we hardly bother to pay any attention to the ever-expanding
problems in education, economy, culture, religion, social reforms,
environment etc. Whichever the infinitesimally small headways
and achievements we have made in these sectors, they stand
ineffectual in the light of our age-old habit of praising and patting
ourselves for our small-term gains as well as our penchant to
magnify and glorify them vulgarly for a long time till they turn too
dry to be accepted. Writing encomiums about our past glory [for
example, our ancient culture] and present achievements
[especially during a few decades]is not bad but playing them long
with blaring tones is quite unpalatable and indigestible, sickening
healthy minds and hearts. The attempt here is not to demean the
Indian glory, strengths and achievements but an appeal to
moderate the typical habit of self-praise and self-glorification_ the
inevitable outcome of fencing our minds towards other nations’
achievements and canoodling our national ego. Take for example,
the ‘noisy’ praise of the Gujarati pride in ‘The Times of India’
[Ahmadabad] or the Shining India clammour of the BJP or the
Incredible India ads: they all praise the hollow parochial
sentiments, vainly trying to prove that we are doing far too better
in different walks of life. Such things are laughable and, at the
same time, repulsive. The act of self-glorification is always
injurious and disastrous, since it cocoons us within our own
collective social ego and disallows us to embrace the bracing
‘exotic winds’ coming from the window of objective observation,
now closed tightly. Most of the Indians need to come out of their
own self-built artificial islands with a shaky ground and observe
the dazzling examples of other nation’s robust achievements in
the afore-mentioned sectors. For example, we simply keep
watching US, China, Russia, EU etc. striding high and long in R&D
in space, defense, medicine, education, IT etc. while the
researches in these fields in India are very few and far
betweendue to the age-old Indian woes of lack of resources.
Another important feature of the most of the Indian public is that
it tends to stick to older norms and views as is evident from no
significant social outrage over the attack on pub-going women by
Shri Rama Sene members. Another is to continue with the view
that the male member is more important to the family than the
female one, leading to the widespread female foeticide across the
country_ the flagrant violation of human rights_ bringing utter
shame to us in the world community. Is there no place to assume
that we, the Indians, are responsible in some way or the other for
this blatant violation of women’s fundamental right to exist? Are
we aware of the social cost we would pay for these old, male-
biased blind views and wrong beliefs? The Indian male chauvinism
is surely the result of the widespread Indian orthodoxy we are so
proud of as a kind of Indian legacy which, as is assumed by the
public sentiment, should move forward through generations,
though come what may. Sticking tenaciously to traditionalism as a
bug to a rug is really loathsome and creates mental nausea or
repugnance in any sensible being. Mahatma Jyoti Rao Phule, Dr.
B.R.Ambedkar, Shahu Maharaj, V. D. Sawarkar etc. fought against
the fossilized views and sentiments in the orthodox Indian psyche;
but they seem to have lost the battle,since casteism is still
practised openly and unashamedly throughout the country.
Honour killings of and persecution of ‘love-birds’_ which form daily
newspaper reports_ are carried out in a gruesome manner
especially when their castes differ. Loud protests expressing
outrage in these cases are rare, indicating the passive, tacit and
indirect social approval of such inhuman acts. As is evident from
our periodically expressed cocky statements, we are still proud of
our such a diseased culture where humanity suffers at the hands
of a large number of scoundrels who habitually express loud-
mouthed jingoism and the so-called panic-stricken cultural
protectionism. Let’s feel, at least, some shame while expressing
false and hollow pride. We, the Indians, are actually ‘the hollow
men; the stuffed men’.
Another characteristic feature found in most of the Indians is cold
indifference towards social evils. Rarely can be found the cases
when a wounded person in some accident reaches to the nearby
hospital and that too in time. Our tendency to take the Indian law
by letter (and not by its spirit) results in the unpardonable delay
in the medical treatment meted out to the wounded. We also
have grave indifference towards and utter disregard for life-
threatening environmental issues as if they are valueless. By
indiscriminately exploiting natural resources on the Indian terrain,
like the cloud of locusts on John Milton’s green fields in ‘The
Paradise Lost’, we are inviting the never-thought-of disaster to the
nation’s fragile ecology and we will have to pay for that. The ever-
increasing denial mode on our part is surely the sign of the
magnifying stigma of stagnancy associated with the Indian
society and the upcoming socio-cultural unrest that would land
the country nowhere.