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…