Is India on the brink of hitting old age?

10.30 am:  I sit with Anne Frank’s Diary. The first chapter and I pull myself away from the disturbing text. I pick up `Griffin and Sabine’ and the haunted love notes between two lovers who never met, across continents and the subconscious, sting tears somewhere in the eyes. I shut it. Maybe `Men are from Mars, Women from Venus’ should prep me up? But the couple here seems too complicated to deal with. Why are men and women fighting all the time? I surf the radio. A Jew narrates the disappointment and destruction of his promised land. The land of milk and honey has turned into a living land mine, with barbed wire for company. And then a friend plays the `Gayatri Mantra.’ A chant invoking inner peace, serenity, bowing down to the wonder of the Almighty, His creation and His infinite mercy. Life, surely, is a bundle of contradictions.

By the time you read this edit today, the visitors stalls will have been dismantled around the Secretariat, the tea party at the Governor’s will be over, the list of who attended and who did not, filed into the expenses folder. The neatly ironed uniforms kept for another occasion, another year that goes on by towards territorial menopause. The guns are still there. The murders are still happening. Everyday there is a terrorist born. The innocent hunted down. Of course, what has changed in Goa is the nakabandi. Great way to keep tabs on who is going where!!

The earth beneath Gujarat is shaking again. It’s shaking under my feet too. But I don’t carry the burden of mass murders, neither of guilt. What I do carry is the weight of powerlessness throw in like a last minute pinch of salt. I’m told we have reasons to celebrate our independence. So many Indians have brought honour to the country worldwide with their achievements. They’ve given Bill Gates a run for his dollar in Billy’s own country, mind you. We have the honour of so many firsts – right from inventing the number system, to the world’s first university in Takshita (700BC), to discovering Ayurveda as the earliest school of medicine known to humans, to being the world’s only source of diamonds (uptil 1896), to pioneering wireless communication (yes sir, it was Prof Jagdish Bose and not Marconi), to building the earliest reservoir and dam for irrigation in Saurashtra, inventing chess, and developing the place value system and the decimal system in India (100 BC). I discovered an endless list, and for 10 seconds my chest swelled with national pride. I was an Indian. I had to be proud of my country. Even if the underworld antics of our brat pack were all the newspapers were bitching about. Day after day. Headline after headline. One court order after another. Had we forgotten what it used to feel like being an Indian?

I picked up Arundhati Roy’s `The Greater Common Good’ loaned to me by another friend. It is an India that sucks the lifeblood of its disadvantaged. The poor and its wretched. Hunger compromised for growth, and I thought a nation’s wealth was its ability to feed its people. We were snatching away their livelihood. Didn’t they belong to India?

My daughter recites the national anthem with great enthusiasm. It reminds me of the pleasure it gave me as a young, impressionable student, wanting to get to the top of the class, so that I could be a better Indian with a fool proof degree. I got a fool proof degree alright, and enough accolades at the board exams, but somewhere along the line to find that I had compromised by not being all Indian. Competition had blinded me to the virtues of extending my camaraderie to people of other communities. They were stumbling blocks. Not people with faces. Or identities.

I tell my daughter today why it is important to make good friends. When not to compete, and just be. Why the `Hindu’ is not any different from a `Catholic,’ even if one goes to a temple and the other prays to a man hanging on the Cross. There is no difference in the eyes of God. There is no birthmark to segregate those to go to heaven, and those who choose to live in their own hell. There is no yardstick to measure a `brahmin’ as differently as a `sudra,’ just because one adopts the custom of using a fork and spoon, the other, his fingers. I’ve personally seen these petty prejudices up front. I have no respect for people who hang on to these aberrations, in order to give them a sense of purpose. These are devious ways to keep the gap yawning for further exploitation. In body, mind and soul.

Do I care if I have a `brahmin’ chief minister or a `brahmachari’ prime minister? Do I care whether he eats beef or shuns pork? Do I have the time to involve myself in the pettiness of each of their own politics, because the survival of the fittest depends upon their respective power struggles? I don’t care if they write poetry. I don’t care if they hate Pakistan. I don’t care if the US has a bigger, better bomb than us. I care about the country that has found itself infested with rats. They are eating away at her soul. They are slowly taking her towards menopause (or are we already there? We’re 55, after all). And we all know how destructive that can be sometimes.

Is India on the brink of hitting old age? We’re surrounded by old fogies masquerading as leaders anyway.

Ethel Da Costa
August 28, 2002

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