Ruchir
Joshi, a social observer, writer and newspaper columnist of my own generation
(he is 59) is worried about how ‘boorish and thuggish’ we Indians are becoming,
as this article in the March 12 edition of The
Telegraph says, with a dire warning at the end.
What
he has to say about it you can read for yourself: I won’t waste words
summarizing him here. The point is this is an issue that has deeply troubled me
for ages, and yes, I too have felt that things have been growing worse lately.
Yes,
Indians (at least a very large percentage of them) are brash and uncouth and
socially callous; yes, they have been growing worse, and yes, if things keep
sliding the way they are, there might sooner or later be an ‘explosion’,
meaning that far too many random acts of crudeness and cruelty might make our
society totally dysfunctional. So even if they can be understood and
sympathized with, they cannot be condoned or forgiven. Especially that large
section of them who are well-off and claim to be ‘educated’ too, yet count
among the most guilty. Refer to the woman at the airport check-in counter described
in Mr. Joshi’s article. Look into the mirror inside your mind and ask whether you have not often behaved as badly yourself, unprovoked.
This is not a recent phenomenon. If Indians are
growing more insufferable, that has been happening for quite some time now. I
remember my grandfather, the nicest, most self-effacing and mild-mannered
gentleman I have ever known, grumbling to himself as we walked the streets of
posh south Calcutta when he was in his late sixties and I in my late teens, ‘nikiri-te bhorey gelo deshta’… the
country is filling up with guttersnipes. And he was not talking about only the
poor and ignorant, or only the political class.
I
believe, first, that the root of the problem lies not in overpopulation and
congestion and poverty and the mad, incessant scramble over scarce essential
resources that that terrible combination entails – though they are very
important factors indeed, and the situation might
be somewhat ameliorated if they no longer dominated our lives (which, I think,
would forever remain wishful thinking!) – but in the fact that we have only
recently emerged from thousand-year old slavery into self-governance, and it
has been said that there is no worse a tyrant than a recently-freed slave.
Imagine a billion-plus recently freed slaves, from those who have become prime
ministers to those who have managed to do no better than remain chaiwallahs and autorickshaw drivers and
clerks and salespersons of varied descriptions. Imagine, then, that they have
suddenly begun to enjoy a heady concoction of vastly increased personal liberty
(or impunity from harsh punishment for wrongdoing, which for most people is
quite the same thing) and rapidly increasing material prosperity, their own or at
least all around them, while aspirations rise even faster, much faster than can
be fulfilled for most of them, which fills them all with intolerable
frustration, jealousy and spite. Combine this with the fact that, the more we
are exposed to what is happening all over the world, the more we suffer from a
deeply-hurting inferiority complex as a vast nation of underachievers (whether
you think in terms of Nobel Prizes or Olympic golds, recent scientific progress
or military prowess), and who chafes more, who wants to throw his weight around
over trifles than a man with a huge inferiority complex, or a whole nation with
the same?
So
whether we are shoving ahead in queues or flaunting luxury limousines, whether
we are mouthing obscenities or boasting about how brilliant at everything our
ancestors were or about giving our neighbouring country – much weaker than us,
of course, for otherwise we wouldn’t dare – a bloody nose now and then, whether
we are shouting from the rooftops that the IITs are better than MIT or cricket
is better than football simply because we cannot produce footballers, whether
we are telling everybody who cares to listen and everybody who doesn’t who our
dad is or crying down like a pack of wolves baying for blood any fellow
countryman who dares to suggest we have faults we need to correct fast – it all
comes down to the same causal factor, I think. Too much liberty and wealth too
soon, too little political attention to the need for stern rule of law, too widespread
and nagging a sense of inferiority and far too little education about why it is
important to be civilized and what that means at all.
We
supposedly value the family very highly in this country. It follows, then, that
it is the immediate family which gives most of the primary value education to
children, followed by the early years in school. ‘Higher’ education, for the
relatively few who receive it, has always been mostly about learning less or
more sophisticated skills for making a living. So the kind of people we grow up
into, the kind of doctors, engineers, teachers, policemen, traders, politicians
and parents we become, essentially depends on the kind of value education we
have received within the first ten years of life. With me so far? Then, if we
don’t in the mass become nice and gentle people, isn’t that where we should pin
the blame?
I
am asking any reader who is a thoughtful person, regardless of whether in the
teens or the seventies, to reflect – if the majority of people in some
countries we hear about are friendly and polite, unassuming, considerate and
helpful, surely that is not a result of blind chance? Surely they have been
schooled into it through generations of patient and mindful labour of parents
and schoolteachers? (the descendants of the bloodthirsty Vikings are said to be
among the gentlest people on earth today!)
Most
children are not born either definitely saints or monsters. They are highly
malleable creatures, and they imbibe early on the values they see being
practised – not just professed, mind you – by their family elders and teachers and being respected by society at large.
Now ask yourself, do we in India really, honestly teach our children to grow up
to be good people – good in the sense of being kind and gentle, quiet, thoughtful
and helpful, modest and honest – because we are convinced that will make a good
society in which the same children will flourish best? Or do we instead drive
deep into their skulls from a very early age that it’s a dog eat dog world, so
callousness, rudeness and aggression are fine and even desirable, and one only
needs to ‘succeed’ in material terms, having things to show off is everything,
marks and prizes, money and overflowing shopping bags and fancy nameplates and
cars with beacons and hooters if possible… oh, I know not many parents put
their values in so many words, but isn’t that precisely what the children learn
from their acts? Do children ever
learn to value and respect good people?
I
did early on, you see. I told you about my grandfather. I also picked up the
same values from Voltaire and Russell and Maugham’s Salvatore, and Bibhuti Bandyopadhyay’s Dhaotal Sahu, and Tagore’s
remark that if there were fewer clever men and more good ones around, the world
would have been a much nicer place. I tried being good in that sense for a very
long time, and got kicked in the face for it, and not once, by apparent bhadralok of both genders too (see my
earlier blogposts titled The banality of evil and chhotolok)*, until I
became an unsocial ogre of sorts. So I have advised my daughter that in this
world (or at least this country) it is not enough to be good – one needs to be
clever and cautious as well in order to avoid being needlessly, undeservingly
hurt. And that realization about the kind of country I live in only makes me a
sadder man. I shall rejoice if India is someday voted as one of the nicest
countries to live in, but I do not expect to see it happening, at least in my
lifetime.
Do
my readers think I take an unjustifiably dark view of life?
*How
unspeakably vulgar some of these bhadralok
have become my Bengali readers can see from this news item on the actress
Swastika Mukherjee’s lament about them in today’s newspaper. My most abject
apologies to her on behalf of all such animals. Nikiri-te bhore gelo deshta…
