Why India should not be made in the image of west ?
first modernity is not westernizing, its not wearing a 6 piece suit in 48% temperature, and thinking your better then, every other sensible men who has dress light. its not about torturing one’s ownself after all.
Neither is modernity about speaking English fluently, or sprinkling little bit of French in your English, to make it inconceivable for the audience you are suppose to communicate to. (personally, I look at them as circus monkey, trying to perform amazing gymnastic feat, which no one knows what the purpose is ? But everyone is amused. maybe the effect of colonial hangover.
I remember a German friend who use to say
Indian will listen keenly to a white plumper speaking on rocket science, it’s not what you say, it’s more of how white or western it is and how hard it is to understand.
Nor is it to justify English as the only scientific language, or superior to all other world languages, You learn English cause it is the language of commerce and, guess what ? you have made it one, cause you are a billion plus big market. After all language is just a tool of communication and a language like English which has phonetical imperfection, nor has great number of alphabet nor refined grammar, cant certainly be scientifically superior, If china succeeds in it’s world domination. I bet you, you will force your children to learn mandarin and will start communicating to your infants, like Pinyin. nǐ jiào shénme míngzi re ! or Pinyin. nǐ jiào shénme míngzi babu ! depending on your a Goan or not.
In the end modernity is only the ability to learn , adopt ,develop and use technology. (as we see Japanese are modern people ).
Identity is ability to recognize that your different and be able to define and preserve your uniqueness.
But civilized society or nation or community is to identify the problems you have, acknowledged it, study it and responsibly try to solve it, in your own unique context. Not to copy blindly off the shelf, similar solutions just cause you feel you are uncivilized to solve your own problem. This is either being lazy or an self imposed inferiority. I think the later is right in Indian context but all of this are distinct and independent.
As the Arabs are very modern and very proud of their distinct identity but barely civilized.
The southeast Asian has a distinct identity, proud of their heritage. They are civilized too, but hardly modern.
The Japanese, US, Russian and now Chinese are very modern, has a distinct identity and very civilized(even if you don’t agree with their ways ).
The Europeans are very modern and are very much civilized but losing their distinct identity.
Indians are modern but neither can preserve their distinct identity and are un-civilizing themselves as a copy monkey.
And then we have Pakistanis who are neither modern nor civilized and are in crisis of identity lying to themselves, yes Indians are catching up with their blood brothers.
But by all this I am not saying, we can’t or should not learn from the west.
No we must learn from all corners as the Veda’s says, “let good ideas come to us from all directions”. But let me illustrate why being a copy monkey.
which we have been for last 70 years out of our own free will is disastrous. For example
- We imported linguistic nationalism from Europe into India, which was a multilingual and multicultural country without any tensions from time immemorial, as if we evolved to accept and adapt and learn, from each other. We celebrated diversity not just at national level but even in a same family, like son might be atheist, father a monist and mother might be polytheist, maybe it is because of our open philosophy which was never exclusive. We never in history had a lingual friction like (French vs German or French vs English). We have no history of major conflict on the basis of language, rather our languages heavily borrowed from each other, enriching each other and evolving better. But now, guess what you get Marathi vs Konkani or kannada vs Hindi name it every one is fighting for his exclusive lingual identity.The exclusivity ideas or the urge to create homogeneous zombies is unknowingly borrowed from west, and we are rapidly killing our open identity/philosophy buy keeping it unambiguous and not defining it. After all India was a place where Islam became more sufi and plural to a point. Where Dara the crowned Mughal prince wanted to tell the whole world bout the upanishads, but see now the wahabis are back and knocking, religious identities which were of no concern a generation or two back are surging and are shedding blood and spewing hate.
2. We imported majority vs minority concept, it was developed to protect minorities, where the majority was united, bigoted and enjoyed absolute power, this was a great civilized way of dealing with this unique problem faced by west. You never had this in India, a place where minority was the overlord for last 1000 years, ruled with an Iron fist, by their records, slaughtered a record number of Indians. Arguably we are the longest genocide survival. (This includes all Indic people irrespective of religion). Yeah the bulk of minority never ruled but were rather oppressed first hand, but a significant section of them do falsely identify themselves with their former oppressor, then their own blood brother’s further alienating themselves rather then integrating. There is an perfect example which can show you, what it actually means to segregate Indians as majority, minority and bestow the minority special privileges, its like giving special protection to the whites of South Africa cause they are minority. After giving them a separate country too on the borders and denying them reconciliation and lying to them, that they are threaten, cause of the vast numerical majority the black enjoys, now you see the injustice and horror. Imagine the reactions the blacks will have ? Further shun a logical sensible good intentioned black, as black terrorist, if he speaks the truth. Further killing any chances of reconciliation and try to force guilt on them. This is how you rather then reconciling and moving forward, take a state to a civil war. Isn’t this the reason of Hindu consolidation and friction between communities in India ?
We imported class based social hierarchy of the Victorian age where the nobles, clergy and pleasant were classified and mapped it on Jaati and varna, with no understanding of these concepts, nor reforming it in the right way it could have been, and imported a Portuguese word or better derived a word from a Non-Indian, Portuguese word called casta into caste. Rather then removing the unspeakable bias against the weaker section and giving them pride and including them as equal. We just entrenched and infused caste based hate, even when nobody today is damned to do the job of his father, everybody irrespective of his caste has a shot to climb the ladder of success, but hate which was not there, has made headways for the bias of the state or on the injustices of past, but again the injustice done by one section on all of these people cant be spoken off that makes you communal. This is what mess, we have made by copying the west.
We have blindly accepted that the western people were the only civilized people and has conquered us time and again, all good things came from the west. The Dravidian’s (Indians) were worst of all scum, which surprisingly has no scientific or literal historic evidence, but are from the fiction writing of a German called Max muller and rather then correcting this, we make TV serial on it, or teach our children in their school, even our govt websites says the same. Worst is people take pride in either being a Dravidian or Arayans, thank god! Max muller did not write Game of thrones or we would have identified ourselves as House of Targaryen, House of Arryn, House of Lenister etc. and fought each other. This is the level of madness we are in.
We celebrate psycho analyzing our dead leader, by Freudian methods why ? Cause a western woman thought its awesome, exotic idea. Even when Freud himself said, this cannot work on dead people.
We are geared to be western tech coolies, then to think free. We need chapter number and page number, Zakir naik style. This man said this and he has proven that. Where is our common sense, lost ? We have even stopped thinking. This is why I call Indian as a copy monkey, repeating without a second thought.
So amazed by white skin, that you buy various sort of cream to get a shade white, when your ancestors said the most beautiful man was Madhusudhan (Krishna) a black or dark man and the most beautiful women was a dark or dusky lady called Draupati. Where this obsession for white skin came in ? It is same in our colonial cousins in Africa isn’t it.
This is so destructive, that no Indian today know, why or what makes India a country, some says British untied us, when the fact is the British divided us into 600 small states. Don’t believe me, see what they did of the Maratha empire, or Sikh empire, they divided it into kashmir under a Dogra king for money , Patiala , Multan , Bhawalpur etc. they made ever small or large chief as Raja, who supported British to take down their bigger overlord didn’t they ?
Talking of Indian madness will not end, let me now explain why all western values aren’t universal.
West exported democracies to the middle east. See what mess they created there , we must understand that every country or at least region is unique and there are 1000s of factor local and unique to them. I am not saying we should not criticize them, we should. That will drive them to be better, but we must not impose what we think is right over others, and nor should anyone in awe copy others, like monkeys or Indians. They should take responsibility and solve their unique problem in their unique way and not make jugad.