Closing of Indian Mind

Though Mary Kom the Bollywood biopic on the boxing sensation from Manipur may be raking the moolah at box office, with one Facebook meme even claiming that Priyanka Chopra, who plays Mary Kom, earned more money in this film than Mary Kom in her lifetime, it has no way made even a minor jab on the well entrenched prejudice 'mainland' Indians harbour towards their Northeast cousins.

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

AAP Effect: Brooms' Point of View

We have always been looked down upon by all Indians as we are involved in keeping surroundings clean, something that figures very low in their priority list. And it shows when you take a stroll down the streets and bazaars of the country. 

Though we have become redundant in the West due to technological advances and scientific methods of garbage collection and disposal, in India we continue to be the front line weapon of the hapless civic workers and housemaids, whose status in the society is no better than ours.

There are many superstitions associated with us. It’s considered inauspicious if we happen to be the first thing people see in the morning. We are supposed to get attached to the house where we sweep, hence if people are moving house, they don’t take us along. And of course there are long standing beliefs linking us with witchcraft (those scrawny evil creatures with long nails supposedly use us to fly!), which spans many cultures and religions.

So when Aam Aadmi Party decided to make us their election symbol we all were quite literally 'swept' off our feet. Political parties in order to show their sympathies towards working class had eagerly chosen symbols such as plough, hammer, sickle etc. But they never touched the lowly broom even with a barge pole. Because those who wielded us belong to lowliest of the low category among workers, what is politely called 'unroganised sector'. AAP decided to make us their symbol as we denoted 'dignity of labour'.

We saw AAP partymen with amusement. They were a youthful lot and seemed like a bunch of a college troupe enacting a drama on freedom struggle, because they were always seen with Gandhi topi. But in order to steer clear from the derogatory connotations it had acquired in independent India, they had mein hoon aam aadmi printed on it.

It was indeed thrilling to feel the soft touch (unlike civic worker's weather beaten hands) of techies, former IAS officers, bankers, IITians, lawyers, B-school alumni and members from all walks of Indian society, who wielded us with pride, as if we were swords. At AAP rallies we began having a pride of place.

All this gave us a heady feeling, but we were little edgy about the party's future. Most of the partymen had cut their political milk teeth with India Against Corruption movement. But organising an agitation and going through the rough and tumble of elections was something as starkly different as playing Farmville and wielding the actual plough. Moreover the party did not have the blessings of the patriarch of anti-corruption crusade - Anna Hazare. He saw politics as an irredeemable cesspool and was disinclined towards joining it.

Media saw AAP as an airy fairy group of trollers who would never make a splash beyond the confines of social media and coffee shops. This dismissive attitude continued till some opinion poll findings in the run up to Delhi assembly elections began trickling in. Even then Arvind Kejriwal's move to contest against incumbent chief minister Shiela Dikshit was seen as tad ambitious, if not foolhardy.

The rest they say is history and the resulting power shifts after the election verdict catapulted AAP into Delhi's gaddi, albeit as a minority government. Now for them the new challenge is of running an accountable government. It calls for a different skill set and there are umpteen examples in Indian politics of parties and leaders who had came to power on reformist platform and street battles, but proved total misfits when it came to governance.

How AAP will perform as a government is in the realm of speculation and not for lowly creatures like us to comment on. We leave this to the rarefied world of TV studios to do the honours. But AAP's one-year long road to electoral politics is indeed dotted with many milestones. It did prove that elections can be fought using shoestring budget and clean money. It is possible to groom a bunch of self made leaders, who don't have pedigree, caste or money power wired in their DNAs. All this was against the grain of how Indian politics was being practiced and shook off the man on the street's from his sab chor hain mental stupor vis-a-vis politics and politicians.

Lastly our chests puff up with pride for the fact that we too are part of this 'sweeping' reform in a humble way and hope this would somehow improve the living conditions of those who wield us to make a living.

Also Read: Bangalore Beat

Guns Come Calling

Yet another shooting took place. No, I am not referring to Connecticut, but our own Connaught Place in Delhi. A guy at a Dhaba was quite pissed off on being served leftover food and after few rounds of heated arguments, took out his gun and fired at the waiter. Probably he was not a good shot, the waiter escaped unhurt and the police were prompt enough to arrive and arrest the quick-gun Pande.

It is not yet clear whether the weapon he used was a licenced one or not, but most probably it might be latter.  Going by the recent events it looks like we are sitting on a huge pile of unlicensed weapons; and they are now making their presence felt in urban centres.

The recent killing of liquor baron Ponty Chadha at a farmhouse near Delhi and the attack on a hospital in Guragon point to the alarming trend of use of illegal firearms and the lack of scrutiny by authorities while issuing licence for firearms. Sukhdev Singh Namdhari - an alleged conspirator behind the murder of Chadha and his brother, obtained arms licence and passport by providing fake residence proof. He even got his arms licence renewed twice without surrendering the original documents.

The landed gentry in villages have always owned guns, ostensibly to guard their farms and for hunting. The gun culture in the badlands of Chambal valley and Bihar enjoyed a wild-West like cult image. The illegal arms factories dotting some of the small towns in Uttar Pradesh, Madhya Pradesh and Bihar mainly catered to the dacoits and naxalites in the hinterlands. The end of Phoolan Devi era brought down big-ticket dacoities, which used to hog media headlines.

Now the guns manufactured in these units are finding its way to places such as Delhi, Gurgaon and other urban centres in North India. They are no longer fired just in the air during weddings and other celebrations, but are being used to prove a point. They are brandished during road rages, at toll plazas and other places to prove Mao Zedong's dictum that "power flows from the barrel of the gun".

With wheels of justice in our country hardly proving to be any deterrent, guns are being used with impunity and often in public places like crowded streets and hospitals. It looks like we are heading towards a Kalashnikov culture that has blighted Pakistan since late 1970s.

Also Read: Bangalore Beat

Left Out In The Cold

The yearly statistics of death due to cold wave comes as a chilling reminder of how miserable the poor and homeless are in our country. In this context the rosy statistics of rising GDP, of being third largest economy, a rising economic powerhouse, sounds almost like saying that though the patient is sinking, the medicine has helped in improving his complexion!

Sadly in this country life has been, quite literally, dirt cheap. This shows up in every calamity - be it annual floods, cyclone or frequent terror attacks and winter deaths are no exception. And mind you we are a tropical country and we do not have to put up with the kind of harsh winter our peers in Scandinavian or North American countries have to. 

Thanks to Himalayas our snow-bound regions are confined mainly to our northern fringes. But we still manage to have 'cold wave' deaths even in places where there is no snowfall and are quite far away from the Himalayas.

Today a Delhi-based social worker came on TV and said that people were dying not due to cold but due to lack of clothes. It is all the more sad to hear. It means they just don't have the purchasing power to buy proper clothing to withstand cold weather. Moreover, very little is known about what happens to the homeless in towns such as Meerut, Kanpur,  Hoshiarpur or Patna where our TV channels sparingly train their cameras.

Since most of these homeless people are from the fringes of the society - migrant workers, beggars, drug addicts, mentally unstable persons - politicians have little interest in them as many are not even registered voters. Why just blame politicians? A recent column in Hindustan Times revealed how even religious charities in Delhi were shying away from feeding these sections.

Our pink press may rave about some thirty-something scion of Indian Inc figuring in Forbes richest list, but the abysmal levels of country's per capita income almost seems to mock at all these achievements. Going by per capita figures even countries like Algeria or Tunisia look quite enviable compared with us. Maybe we can take cold comfort from the fact that ours is a tad better than Pakistan or Afghanistan!

It is high time our leaders and financial experts stopped thinking in terms of GDP and started using per capita income as a yardstick of progress.