I am trying to understand things here. So do bear
with me. I am trying to make sense of the country I live in and the country I
read about in my school textbooks.
Is it just me or do you also recognize the
comforting sense of belonging somewhere, the core need of identity over the
years has become mutant and toxic. I am not sure if it is a result of people
living and working in places outside of their own cities OR if it is a result
of the cities trying to shun these people who enter their womb trying to do
something for themselves. You get chided if you like to call yourself as an
Indian, you are looked upon suspiciously. You look upon people suspiciously who
are not forth coming of the city they call home. You joke, but the uneasy
feeling has already rooted itself within you. So deeply, so suddenly, that you
find it hard to articulate or acknowledge its presence.
I am unsure when the city and its residents enter
into a codependent, possessive relationship to the point of being unhealthy. Some
cities are blatant and will tell their relationship status to anybody who will
care to list, while others are more subtle.
This revelation, the exposure to this caustically
guarded relationship, always comes to the fore when you travel a city through auto-rickshaws
and taxis. The most easiest way to form an impression about an Indian city and
to gauge its ugly human face, to understand how one will get bullied into
cowing down to its tune. For example, in a city like Chennai, you will be
vocally told to fuck off if you raise your voice and demand that the driver use
the meter. While a city like Bombay, or Mumbai as its proud residents like to
call it, you will be given the rate card for non-residents which has the jacked
up prices. Some of this bullying is explicit and some subliminally powerful.
But the message is clear, 'if you can't fake that you have been born and spent
your entire life in this city, if you can't respond to the local abuse with
equal fervor, then fuck off to a place where you feel you belong'.
What I find both alarming and unnerving is the
fact that violence is the go to response mode. I maybe commenting on things,
seated in my armchair, dreaming utopian visuals of the song bird I read my
country was back in school. But one wonders…
Is this the reason why people no longer tolerate
any other view which doesn't belong to the majority? Is this how stupid, angry
mobs are formed, ready to burn down buildings and kill people under the guise
of religion and discriminate under the guise of regional stereotyping? It very
well could be.
There could be many other such reasons to. Is that
why we believe going abroad for higher studies and then finding a job there and
settling abroad is the only thing left to do? Because out there, we believe we
will neither confront or be confronted? Because, we as a nation, love to watch
the fight from the sidelines? No amount of talking or listing up stringent
punishments for perptuators of crime will deter or stop them from doing what
they please because we are born to call things our own.
I am just not sure if it starts and escalates from
things like 'that's my pencil/eraser/bag/shoe/whatever’ to ‘that's my city/religion'.
Just somewhere along the line, we forget the concept of 'that's ours' and ‘it’s
okay, you can have mine’.
I liked the India I grew up in and read about in
my books. Not the one where milk and honey flowed like rivers, but, one where
we all believed to we were Indians and we were all awesome. Where Doordarshan
played PSA about ‘unity in diversity’. One wonders, what it would take for
people to start sharing things and being happy and grateful for that.
One wonders…
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