A Facebook post by one Sreemoyee Piu Kundu about a scene in a Delhi multiplex screening the movie and later at a nearby restaurant was quite an eye-opener and succinctly sums up our fetish for symbolic gestures and quite literally 'skin deep' sense of national integration and inclusiveness.
At the end of the movie the national anthem is played and one couple refuses to stand up and all hell breaks loose. They are grabbed by the collar to stand up and reminded how Mary Kom has done India proud and how dare they sit and 'watch the fun', with choices Hindi expletives (ranging from Kuttey to MC, BC kind) thrown in. The fight snowballs to a mini riot with bottles flying and the security had to be called in to help people get out of the movie hall.
At the restaurant she describes how a group of Manipuri women, whom she had seen at the movie hall, get a taste of well entrenched prejudices and misogyny among a group of purebred Delhi youths of Punjabi kind. They sing cheesiest songs and even harass the waiter serving the Manipuri women. When one of the women stands up, they whistle and one of them remarks, 'oye yeh toh saali Mary wali aankhen dikha rahin hain...'
One among the waiters, all hailing from Northeast, pleads with them to be quiet but gets pushed by one of the youths, who remarks, 'yeh dekh Mary ka ek aur aashiq!' The girls quietly pay and leave whatever they had ordered untouched. The guys then sing 'Hindi chini bhai bhai...'
Symbolic gestures like standing up for national anthem comes easy to us, but inculcating a far more complex sentiment like seeing a person from other community or state as equal is something we could not accomplish even 60 plus years after independence.
Though one of the cornerstones of our freedom struggle was national unity, quite ironically brought about by English education, and our stalwarts of freedom struggle had tried their level best to break down linguistic, communal and caste barriers of our vast and diverse land, but they were not fully successful, resulting in division of the country. After 1947 Jawaharlal Nehru and other leaders had made conscious efforts to promote national integration, but somewhere down the line their successors lost the zest and we lost the plot. Moreover the Northeast for some mysterious reason always remained in the fringes and little did we learn about those regions in our school, barring maybe Naga dance.
The country ended up being a conglomeration of various linguistic and religious enclaves.Slogan like 'unity in diversity' remained just that - slogans. For most of us the very idea of encountering people who are different is unsettling. Hence we always harbour a desire for homogeneity. The parameters for homogeneity may vary from person to person, but broadly they look for same language, religion, caste, region and food habits.
Delhi, of course, tops in such churlish behaviour as their tolerance bandwidth is very narrow - it spans from Gurgaon to Noida. Other cities may be a shade better, but are not free from it.
Image Courtesy: Facebook
Also Read: Bangalore Beat
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