Pride, where is thy victory?

 Boredom and discontent are unique to human lives. In a community-based society, these two aspects are barely felt or experienced as one is always involved in one task or the other or one conversation or the other. This society is a manner in which humans had good lives, living as close to what is natural. Pastoral, littoral lifestyles are what come to our minds when we take a nostalgic view of ideal community-based societies. These ideal communities seem to have been decimated by forces larger than them. More than half of the world’s population lives in urban areas currently and more and more are going to move in the foreseeable future, which means the ideal community-based societies, even if they exist are going to be the privilege of the few.

For the rest of the world, urban individual-based lifestyles are going to be the truth of the day. In these societies, as they evolve, the means to express boredom and discontent in manners that are aesthetic and purposeful emerge.

India is a community-based society at heart. And though our cities relentless greed is driving the people out of the villages, all we have sought to create in our cities is perpetuate the community-based life. The father of the nation said, the soul of India is in its villages. And I say, the cities of India are just soulless villages.

Every community-based lifestyle trait was dragged into the cities, by those who stood to gain from it. An example: Every time you hear someone say, “In our villages, everybody greets each other and look at city life, where even neighbours don’t know each other!” beware! Understand that this is an aspiring resident welfare association committee member speaking. It is not the wonderful camaraderie of the village that this gentleman/woman wants to drag into the urban set-up. It is the desire to know the goings-on in their locality, so that they can take ‘important’ decisions pertaining to the society, pass a judgement or two, and issue a few decrees.

Get over it guys, you have never been in a village, why pretend?

One of the main reasons we as a country pretend to be what we are not is because of deep-seated insecurity. It is a feeling all colonised nations have we tell ourselves. But that is not the case. India, you had so many problems that you needed to figure out, that long after the colonists left, you are once again left all alone with your problems and you have no idea who to blame.

The response to a 1927 book ‘Mother India’ written by American author Katherine Mayo is illustrative. We were still under British rule and the book was an argument against granting the country freedom. The book was panned from all quarters, pamphlets were written decrying the contents of the book. I am assuming, we were too weak at the time to take such harsh criticism at its face value. But it has been 93 years since then.

Are we today able to read the book without flinching? Can we look in Ms Mayo’s eyes today and proudly proclaim, “You were wrong”? I am sure we will do just that. Because that is all we have ever been interested in doing, proclaiming you were wrong to all critics, even if we have to lie for it.

All the years that preceded the independence struggle have been to instil a sense of pride in being Indian. If some flaws of the society cannot be removed, they got swept under the carpet. This kept on happening for 30-40 years. We wanted to speak out about the evils in our society but it was always easier to ignore them and feel pride in an imaginary “culture”.

Today, we are at the peak of that pride. From here, the only option for us is to fall.

Yes, it hurts to come to this realisation that we are at the end of run of pride. We are also afraid it will hamper our efforts at succeeding in our little pursuits. Some of us want to opt out from our contributions towards the false pride and take a step back now to assess our evils, etc, but boy, are we feeble! Our understanding of the rot is barely grazing the surface because for miles and miles within there is only pride and more pride.

Our forefathers have taught us well.