Comment

Having been foolishly proud so far, is it time to be ashamed?

It is very disconcerting to discover at a time when you are well past the middle of your life, that all those years have been wasted.

This needs to be explained carefully, with some personal touches. I was born in the early 1960s. India was still a young nation, facing the world with — so we were told —aplomb and courage. The victories of the 1971 war, the cocking a snook at the great US of A, the fact that we had a woman as prime minister were all matters of pride.

History books were full of the glories of India’s past. From the Indus Valley — which we discovered to our joy our parents had not studied about — to the Mauryas, the Guptas, the Cholas, Cheras, Pandyas, Satavahanas and all those great dynasties, from the Sultanate to Shivaji, from the Senas and Palas to the Mughals, we weremade aware that we had a magnificent heritage and belonged to a great and ancient civilisation.

Then there was that freedom movement — what inspiration there!

Everything around us bolstered this feeling of being part of a grand experiment and succeeding. We enthusiastically went with our parents to parades on Republic Day.

It is true that there was hardly any television to entertain us, but it was more than that. We were Indians. We laughed at those silly people who came back from foreign lands to show off about their washing machines and their outdated fashions.

They were like cartoon characters who droned on and on in funny accents about the dirt and the inefficiency. Who took them seriously?

Yes, we knew the horror stories too: Partition, Mahatma Gandhi’s assassination and the travesty of the Emergency. Jayaprakash Narayan’s challenge to Indira Gandhi was followed with much enthusiasm.

We took the misery, the dirt and the inefficiency very seriously. We knew that this nation-in-the-making deserved more. The situation sometimes seemed desperate, but we were never without all hope.

Hindi films provided some of us with the best outlet for any rage against the nation. They were so nonsensical that they took us away from some of the more unpleasant details of life around us: the growing poverty, the sluggish economy, the government that seemed to control everything. Escapist cinema existed for very good reasons: the 1970s.

We fed this sense of the ridiculous. We made fun of ourselves, our heritage and our historical characters. We groaned at Films Division documentaries and giggled over unprecedented coal production in Dhanbad.

And still, we were proud to be Indian. Strangely, no one ever told us to. There were no stickers saying‘Garv se kaho…’ something or the other. Once the stickers arrived, they were a warning.

What we had taken for granted our whole lives — that being Indian was a matter of pride — now had to be pointed out to us.

Since the effects of liberalisation gave us all mobile phones, I understand it. All along, we should have been ashamed of India. It was a lousy no-good country, with bad economic policies, no heroes, strange outdated ideas that won us our freedom —which it incidentally may not even have, according to this school — and a generally miserable history of being conquered and oppressed by others.

Now having wasted my life in needless pride, I need a film star to come on TV and tell me that since the world is recognising India, it’s time to be proud.

Sadly, this is the time when I start to feel ashamed of India. I feel a sense of disquiet over multinational-inspired patriotism, I feel distressed about vulgar jingoism, I feel disturbed over our loud and brash demands that our Indianness be recognised.

It is as if not having money made us worthless before and a little money has made us worthwhile now. It is a shallow country that I must now be oh-so-proud of.

The demand that the Indian cricket team return from Australia afterthe events of last week —or that players wear black armbands — was the final straw.

Without disputing the misbehaviour of the Australian cricket team on the field or the umpiring mistakes, was this really a question of our national honour? Is our honour so small a thing?

What a country we are, of whining, whingeing, self-absorbed, petty people: So easily insulted, so easy to be whipped up into hysteria via sms, so quick to take offence and so quick to defend our right to offend others.

Warts and all, don’t shoot me for thinking my old India was better.

Email: b_ranjona@dnaindia.net