Mohan,
Greetings. This may be a rather long missive, so please bear with me. I have been lurking for some time and have read most of the posts to this thread. I am not of Indian heritage, so please allow me to establish my bona fides. I have been to India five times and have lived there for a total of two and half years (longest continuous period was for 13 months on a Fulbright). I read, write and speak Hindi fairly fluently, but apparently I have a thick accent and my vocabulary is weak. I lived for nine months in Banaras with an Indian family (father was a professor at BHU) and for thirteen months in the Bombay suburb of Kandivili. I have taken daily Ganga-snan in Banaras for months (I quit when it got too cold in December) and I rode the amazingly crowded Western Line into Bombay city center (Churchgate station) for even more months (it was an awful, daily, one hour each direction ordeal; like others, I would board the train at Kandivili and ride it away from Bombay to Borivili, where the train reversed directions, in the hope of getting a seat). I have stayed in a Mataji's cave/hovel at Tapovan (14,000 ft elev) above Gomukh; I have stayed in the homes of multimillionares in Malabar Hill and south Delhi (far south Delhi, near Rajiv's old place) and I have slept on the floors of Kolis and Mangelas.
As a matter of fact, as an outsider to caste, I have been able to move in Indian society in a way no Indian can. I have sung in response to the calls of a Nami-premi while returning from Ram-lila in Ramnagar via boat over a moonlit Ganges to Banaras and I have had a privileged seat in the company of some of the most highly respected Brahman religious leaders of India. I have smoked bhong with sadhus and huddled with men from a Harijan community (or Dalits, as they would prefer), drinking illegal hooch in the backroom of a Kali temple, which was the distribution point for the illegal liquor.
I could go on and on with such examples, suffice it to say that I have traveled extensively in north and west India and have moved in all levels of Indian society. Apologies to southerners, I have heard many wonderful things about the south, but I have never been further south than Goa, which is one heck of a wonderful place (or at least it was before the police discovered how much money they could make shaking down foreigners).
So -- on to my point, is there one? IMHO, the most important contemporary issue is not the nuclear one. I love India and I love Indians even more, but God help us it is pitiful to see Indians and NRIs preening over this. The headline "Explosion of Self Esteem" takes the cake as the most evocative, accurate headline of the century. OK, great, I don't have a problem with India developing its capabilities, but the idea that India is or should be a world power is laughable. Indians are prone to exaggeration. No, not prone to it, they are given to it. Exaggeration is practically an Indian trait (and I am strenuously opposed the idea that there is an "Indian Mind"). It now appears likely that even the recent tests have been exaggerated, but that shouldn't suprise anyone fimilar with India. Whether they exaggerated or not, it doesn't matter. It is established that India can produce nuclear weapons, even if they can only deliver them within a few miles of their own borders. Silly exaggeration bugs me: ratan lal said the US had killed millions in Japan with atomic bombs -- he needs to read some history. BTW, what does ratan lal, as a Phizer investor, think of an Indian company ripping off viagra? And don't give me the bullxxit that they have developed a new method of synthesizing. No company, from any country that really wants to participate in the modern world, can be allowed to rip off millions of dollars of research.
The pervasiveness and extent of the Indian inferiority complex amazes me. I am well aware of Indian cultural history (I can recite many Sanskrit verses and translate anything from Sanskrit if I have a grammar and Monier-Monier Williams nearby) and the absurd claims of such things at Vedic Mathematics. In Indian villages I would always be asked to compare America and India; lord help me if said anything negative about India. I would usually rely: "Har deshon me, ghuch gun aur dosh hota hei."
India is a third world country, not just because it is neither first world (US and allies) or second world (Soviet block), but because 60% of its population is totally illiterate and if not starving, in abject poverty. In Bombay (Mumbai), a city of at least 12 million (including "suburbs") at least a quarter of the population has no access to toliet facilites. A city that gets its electricty from nuclear power, but can't provide toliets for millions of people in its premier industrial/economic city, is not a world power.
The point I want to make is that what is really important is that the BJP has taken power. L.K. Advani as Home Minister is scary. This is what NRIs should be talking about. They have distracted you by appealing to your nationalism/inferiority complex by the, probably exaggerated, tests. Soon India will be happy to sign the CTBT.
N.C.Menon can say that calling the present Indian govt "Hindu" is like calling the Kennedy administration "Catholic," but that is baloney. The BJP has had a long standing policy of "Hindutva" that is inimical to democracy and modern standards. If I was an Indian Muslim I would be very scared. I witnessed a riot in Banaras in which Muslims were attacked and beaten. Standing there in kurta-pajama a man grabbed my arm and told me to go to my hotel, I responded "Main is sahar ka pravasi hum." He said the equivalent of "OK," and I watched Muslims beaten for no reason at all, except that the BJP had been stirring things up re: Ram Janam Bhoomi. That was in '89.
Focus on the fact that a Hindu Nationalist party has taken power and if they can they will turn India into an Indian equivalent of Iran. BTW, did you know that the word "Iran" is the etymological equivalent of "Aryan"?
Namaskar and Kudha Hafiz,
Papillon |
