Source : India MediaI was watching a white man's ode to India -- Slumdog Millionaire -- on, where else (?), channel 135 of Sky in the UK. And then I came across your piece. A brown man's ode to the original Slumdog.
Nehru was the Danny Boyle of his day. He discovered India, but ruled an imaginary India. He preferred the HIndu civil code instead of the uniform civil code; failed to uinderstand the need for a population policy; did not realise that a mixed-economy model also needed socio-economic infrastructure and building educational facilities in the rural areas; he was in a hurry to create states on a linguistic basis, not realising the impact of imposing Hindi as the official language everywhere; he was over-dependent on the public sector which encouraged bureaucratisation, institutionalised corruption and turned trade unionism into rowdyism.
Ambedkar, the gentleman you write about in the piece, said: “If you ask me, my ideal would be the society based on liberty, equality and fraternity. An ideal society should be mobile and full of channels of conveying a change taking place in one part to other parts.”
Sixty years later, it seems an ideal Indian society is tne one only imagined. Like Nehru's India or Boyle's Dharavi. Because the real India is cruel.
Around 350 million – as much India’s wealthy middle class, are illiterate. A similar number of people are below the poverty line. Half of them lack access to drinking water. Half the country’s billion-odd population lacks basic sanitation facilities. Half of India’s children cannot get basic nutrition. Nearly three-fourths of rural India cannot access timely medical facilities and effective medication. ... See More
The girl child continues to be a stigma. Caste inequalities hamper economic and social progress. Linguistic and regional divides boo the concept of India’s inherent strength; it’s so-called nity in diversity. Save the top institutions, education standards are falling as it stands reduced to a mere profit-making venture. Corruption stands tall as ever, as the high priest of development; religious extremism, the high priestess of culture.
Politics in India is all about unbridled freedom for pelf and power to dissent and destroy. The ends justify the means for politicians or police, thieves or armed revolutionaries. Diversity in India can now be explained as people straight-jacketed in vote banks of caste, community, religion, language or region. Indians are bereft of national idols or ideals.
Of course, India rises as one voice when Sachin Tendulkar falls to a wrong decision or Amitabh Bachchan is admitted to a hospital or an Indian student is man-handled in Australia. India also rises as one voice when a Kargil happens or a Mumbai explodes in terror. That's what our news channels show and that's what we, who have no time to see the real India save a couple of minutes to dish out an article on it, prefer to watch.
Indians do believe in a vague sense of oneness. They are as yet unclear what this oneness is, but for them the truth lies somewhere between Tendulkar’s bat and Siachen’s last military outpost, between novel scammer Harshad Mehta and nobel winner Venkatraman Ramakrishnan, between Do Bigha Zameen and Kabhi Khushi Kabhi Gham, between Tata’s |Jaguar and A. R. Rehman’s Jai Ho.
What awakens us Indians to reality is what comes off as reality in celluloid