(Excerpts from my article printed elsewhere) Nobody does self-flagellation better than the Indian. And that is essentially because we have no sense of self. We are ready to sacrifice our essential identity at the temple of lofty principle. A temple that has been set up for confused, geographical transgenders like ours, who need a perch and a sense of liberal praise to have a degree of intellectual vindication. Which is what the BBC and the NYT and all the usual media culprits are trying to remind us of regularly. In a mildly sardonic, per ambulatory way. The West and its media know the great game far better than we ever will. They invented it. Almost along with the invention of India. A case in point. An exquisite essay by the hon. Pankaj Mishra., a writer whose fiction and his book-The Romantics i cant admire enough. But in most of his essay based work, he seems unable to take a subjective viewpoint divorced from personal experience. Here he writes about the gorgeous village of Mashobra and the sad perils of senseless industrialization and over-development. Here he writes about the absence of ecological thinking and a sense of the future.Here he touches upon the national fixation with parking ones black money in construction and real estate. And he parks it all under one umbrella most convenient to him. An umbrella that has been guilty of many things,many of them unwelcome. But to blame a rightward shift in the national psyche for all the ills, real and imagined, of economic liberalization is unfair and humorous. It takes us into the hon. Arundati Roy college of the cure pamphleteer and cute rabble spouter ,that means little in the end. The real enemy, as always, lies within! (And im not even talking about the green southern state whose policies and capital seem to derive from somewhere east of the centre). My memory takes me back to a BBC program covering great train journeys (i think) where the host, the well known Michael Palin, asks a housewife what the single most unifying factor that defined India was.Predictably she couldnt think of one thing that was uniform across India. That defined us as a nation. In retrospect, one can think of a few things. A few things!
Posted on: Sun, 26 Oct 2014 09:46:13 +0000
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