Utpal Brahma said on AssamNet:
+ Something strange about Indians, they always come in
+ extremes. We have one group who sees no evil in
+ whatever mother India does (the likes of Lavakare) -
+ be it inncocents getting least respect for life. We
+ have another group who sees no virtue in whatever
+ little India has achieved or stands for.
an article on the topic:
Hanging India’s dirty linen in public
Indrajit Hazra
November 26
The washing machine went bust long ago and a mountain of linen has
piled up. Like any other country, India too has its fair share of
dirty laundry. The question is: do we hang them up in public?
Despite my penchant for quoting the proverb ‘Patriotism is the last
bastion of the scoundrel’ every now and then, I have felt a rush of
pride surging up each time there’s something good happening in the
name of our Nation-State.
When India wins a cricket match – against Australia, for example,
as it did in the Test series last year – something irrationally
pleasurable makes me feel like singing Vande Mataram (and no, that
doesn’t make me any less secular than when I feel like singing We
Are The Champions. The same feeling creeps up when I hear the world
wowing about some Indian writer, some Indian movie, some Indian dish
etc etc. Sometimes, the tide of pride arrives through the oddest
lane. For example, when I heard that Kim Thayil, the lead guitarist
of the now defunct superband of the Nineties, Soundgarden, was of
Indian origin. (The guy who produced the first Pearl Jam album, Rick
Parasher, is also of desi stock.)
I feel good when I hear good news about India and Indians. So the
flip side is as true: I get deeply ashamed when something shameful
happens. So let’s get back to the original question: does one hang
one’s dirty linen in public? Of course, one has to define first
what one means by ‘public’.
My namesake in the Ramayan, quite clearly realised that his father
Ravana was not the world’s best guy when the latter stole somebody
else’s wife. I believe that he made a big issue out of it and the
usual filial fireworks must have happened in the court of Lanka. Be
that as it may, our man Indrajit decided to fight for his dad and
against Rama because of some strong sort of pride in the fact that
family troubles should be tackled within the family and it was
extremely bad sport to publicise the fracas. (Which is why Uncle
Vibhishan is that great loser from which side you want to look at
him.)
So ‘public’, in the case of India and Indians denotes the world
outside India and non-Indians.
In January, I was at the annual Round Table meet organised by the
Commonwealth Journal of International Affairs at Cumberland Lodge in
England. It was a rather pleasant affair with me listening to
longish lectures, delivering a pitifully short and woolly one, and
meeting up with interesting people with whom I nibbled away on many
stereotypes. After one such session, a lady came up to me. She
worked in an NGO dealing with leprosy and was going back to India
after a couple of years. She told me about her work in Orissa and I
told her about mine in Delhi and things were pottering along, until
she asked me whether it was safe to continue her work in Orissa.
I was a bit flummoxed. There was a time when Westerners (oh, what a
jolly catch-all phrase!) saw India as the land of snake charmers and
elephants and all that. So was this woman stuck in that world where
India was still inhabited by Ganga Din and Maharajas? The penny
dropped after she added, "How seriously dangerous is the Bajrang Dal
in Orissa now?" Other words appeared in my head inside that warm bar
room at Cumberland Lodge: Graham Staines, Dara Singh, Christian
missionaries.
My first reaction was to tell her that it was safe to go to Orissa
and that the incident of Graham Staines was an aberration, an
anomaly. India was not the caricature of a barbaric State where
lynch mobs go running about looking for people unlike them. I kept
telling her that secularism was strong enough to get rid of such
nuisance. She seemed convinced and said that this was pretty much
what she heard from other friends in India also.
Much later, I kept thinking whether my picture was not slightly out
of focus. I still stand by my opinion that what happened at
Manoharpur village in Orissa on January 22, 1999 -- or for that
matter, what happened at the Dangs district in Gujarat in 1998 --
was an ugly aberration. But then, so was Godhra, Gujarat and all
those big or small conflagarations that seem to make newspaper
readers tire of life. Was what I told the lady at Cumberland Lodge
the truth. It was like saying that there’s a billion-to-one chance
of a lightning striking you. But what does that billion-to-one
statistic mean to the person at the other end?
I realised that I was defending my nation’s image – not that I’m
the Republic Day-parade-saluting, Gandhi-photograph-on-my-wall,
pride-in-my-nation kind. Far from it. I badmouth (and badwrite)
India’s political class and society to a point where I’m accused
of being an anti-national, firang-chamcha. But the point is that
some unconscious editing tool flicks into action whenever I talk
about India’s shortcomings to foreigners. As they say, you can take
the boy out of the Nation-State stirrings, but you can’t take the
Nation-State stirrings out of the boy.
More recently, I was talking to a gentleman who works in Geneva for
the European Union. Over baigan bharta and roti, he asked me about
Narendra Modi. Instinctively, I looked away and started telling him
how it’s appalling what happened – and is still on the pot – in
Gujarat. When he, off the cuff, made a remark about how Europeans
found it remarkable that the chief minister, accused of being
hand-in-glove with the post-Godhra carnage was still in power and
was running for reelections, my embarrassment was made acute. I
asked for the bill and felt the same way a chap feels after a
neighbour tells a chap about how he caught his father coming out of
a brothel.
So what does one do when talking about one’s country and countrymen
to outsiders? I have a – perhaps stupid – principle. I tell them
whatever I really think about the ‘dirty linen’ only when asked. I
won’t – yet – get up on a barrel in Hyde Park and shout about the
carnage that happened in Gujarat; or about dubious ways in which the
Indian government handles things from Kashmir terrorism to the
victims of the Union Carbide accident. But when asked, I tell them,
as calmly, as objectively as possible (which is impossible, either
because I’m too ashamed to tell them about the truth or because I
sometimes do feel too strongly about something.)
So in the end, I’m stuck feeling silly in front of a firang who,
when discussing the troubles of India and Indians, either thinks
that I’m the type of scoundrel who is holding on to his ‘last
bastion’; or who thinks that I’m one of those nuts – immortalised
by that Goodness Gracious Me! character who keeps barking about how
all the things in the universe came from ‘India!’ – who refuses
to hear any criticism of his country.
But then again, as people of my generation remember, Nargis was
wrong to slam Satyajit Ray for ‘portraying poverty, and only
poverty’ in his films. Nargis, who made that comment after seeing
Pather Panchali getting rave reviews and awards from the West,
thought that the film was peddling poverty – which was as inane as
saying that Chaplins movies were only about people running around
and kicking people. So if I get slammed for answering uncomfortable
questions about my country to outsiders -- which I, in some weird
admission of tribal camaraderie I don’t relish – so be it. But
then, I have a feeling that there are other fellow countrymen – all
well-meaning, I’m sure – who’ll slam me for not speaking up
enough. In other words, I’m screwed.
P.S. Before I sign off, I just want to tell you about the
uncomfortable truth that I came face to face with after writing last
week’s column on Bill Gates. For one, I was NOT – as most
respondents thought – in favour of throwing Mr Gates’s money that
he donated for AIDS research back at him. Quite the contrary. What I
wanted to say was that even if philanthropy has some hidden ulterior
motive, it is to be applauded.
Likewise Mother Teresa. Her greatness is not to be disputed even if
she had any other motive apart from serving people (like wanting to
being a good person, for example). For all those who thought that I
was slamming Bill Gates and Mother Teresa, let me make it clear that
what I wanted to say was that a good act far outweighs the motive
for the act.
I blame the confusion on my writing skills and as punishment, I have
decided to stop writing this column…. Nearly fell for that one,
didn’t you? Heh, heh.
