Reflections on Bharat/India

 

Reflections on India:

“Even if every Indian who leaves India does not do anything disgraceful it is a big help to India. You don’t need to be a hero every time or everywhere. Just honesty and compassion are enough. This applies also to every Indian who lives in India.

To become useful for India or to be a true Indian you don’t need to live in India. There are many ways you can be useful despite living in another land. 

Being Indian implies more than holding its passport and it is more than just an emotion. It means living its essence in your daily life.”

Above were my thoughts about India that I shared in a post in August-September 2021.

In the same post I then quoted the lines from a poem I wrote in my early twenties and explained through its meaning what India means to me.

भारत समिधा सत्य अहिंसा एक असे असहाय

करी वदनी परिचय तव आता सत् शोधून तव काय

“One who revels in the DIVINE LIGHT (Bharat, the Sanskrit name for India) will find upon investigation that Sacrifice,Truth and Non Violence are NOT SEPARATE from it. Not only is Divinity a single indivisible Reality, but Sacrifice,Truth and Non Violence, though they appear to be distinct entities on the surface, are all inseparable aspects of the SINGLE DIVINITY.

With deeper search( within your inner self )and with experience you will also realize that these principles STAND  STRONG  ALONE without needing anything to support them.

For me this is what India had been then and has been forever. And you can probably see now how my journey was guided by its essence. Just like the tricolor is not India but an iconic representation of India , so is the saree. That is my identity in a multicolored global society.”

In the past 2 or more years that have intervened since that writing, there were personal experiences, which, while providing a glimpse of some ground realities in the country, stood in sharp contrast to the high values that I have always associated with India. The immediate natural reaction to contradiction between image and reality is disillusion. I wasn’t immune to it. It took some time to be able to sit back and compare the image and the ground reality in fresh light and make sense of it. 

It is not my intention nor do I take relish in elaborating the details of the ugliness I came across at close quarters during my extended stay in the country of my birth. However, I do feel that those things at least ought to be named in direct terms because not acknowledging the presence of evil is one way of being complicit with it. If you want it to go away, you need to start by recognizing it.  The negative things do not negate the positive things that, fortunately, still coexist there. But that doesn’t mean one should turn a blind eye to the ugly side. 

These are the grim truths about life in India right now:

Corruption!! 

This tops my list of things that is corroding India.

A common man, a middle class citizen, who is earning his living through hard work and honest means, paying taxes diligently and subsisting on what remains at the end of the day, cannot avoid being a victim of the corrupt system around him. If he has to seek help from the government officials to fix simple problems like an overgrown tree into his property from a neighbor’s yard, or evicting a squatter from his property or to rectify an inaccurate tax bill, just providing evidence that clarifies facts takes him nowhere. Unless he pulls out cash to bribe the officer who wields the power to correct the wrong, nothing will move. The wrong will continue to tout as being right and the right will be silenced and taunted as being wrong. To move on with his life, ironically, the honest man has to humor the dishonest man. He reluctantly learns to justify the compromise. His life seems too short and he, too small to fight back.

Communal disharmony!! 

This probably is no less harmful to the society as corruption. 

Politics has steadily weaponized the diversity of its citizens to dangerous levels. A hierarchy that was built in good faith for practical purposes in ancient India was gradually distorted by perverse elements of the same system to exploit others. Politicians seized on the rising discontent and resistance to the historical injustice and began to use it for their advantage, without any thought of the consequences of such manipulation. To make things worse, those who are manipulated, lack the ability to recognize it after decades of playing into the hands of their leaders, while they begin to get increasingly hostile to their fellow citizens, neighbors and old friends. Hatred brews based on caste, social status, place of birth, language spoken, profession and ironically, religion. Religion whose original aim is to teach about love, respect, service, brotherhood and spiritual growth has become a factor for discrimination and seclusion. The rhetoric heard within closed doors is spilling out into the streets and into social media gathering dangerous momentum and force. What emerges on social media platforms cannot be contained within geographical boundaries. It spreads like wildfire around the globe. And that is today’s reality. Sociopolitical commentary on social media is steeped in hatred and mistrust. The agenda is nowhere about uniting people in the country. 

The other negative things that are big by themselves begin to appear less dangerous compared to the two things discussed above. These include lack of infrastructure planning, explosion of population, increasing gap between the rich and the poor, poor civic sense amongst the masses, resulting filth in most surroundings, lack of resources for essential health services, neglect of preventative care, stunted progress of palliative and hospice services, unsafe conditions for women in both rural and urban areas, exploitation of vulnerable populations and many more issues. There seems to be some hope that some of these things may improve slowly but the first two ( namely corruption and communal disharmony) are really depressing and scary when you can’t find any means to change the course of their winds. 

They stand to directly contradict the values upheld in the poem!! The values that India represented when I was growing up and the India that I see today are at odds with each other. How is one to then reconcile within oneself?

This is how I can best process the dichotomy of the situation. There is an image of India that was laid down for its citizens by the founding fathers of its civilization. Much before the subcontinent was divided into multiple countries as they exist today. Much before it was invaded by Islamic or Imperialist forces. That image, defined by values, was spelled out in words, through its ancient texts and passed down through generations. Those texts exist even today. Those texts put every aspect of human life under one roof. Whether physical wellbeing, mental wellbeing, spiritual wellbeing, medicine, psychology, economics, basic sciences like biology, chemistry, physics, mathematics, agriculture, sociology, history, geography, geology, astronomy, astrology, philosophy, religion based rituals, poetry, grammar, principles of social justice and ethics, and so much more. It was a comprehensive culture that was put forth by men of great wisdom. Even today those books exist and can be referenced if one wishes to access them. The tragedy is that scores of people reference them verbally and casually, in other words, as lip service, but only a few have ever taken the time to access them, let alone read a single line from them. The wisdom of the founding fathers long stopped being of practical use for the masses. Human behaviors began to deviate from the age old principles. As one of my friends put it one day, principles are expensive pets to keep. 

To make the long story short, modern human life has diverged from ancient thought and values. All values that can be traced to ancient times are in use mostly at superficial levels in the current era. Even where it appears to be in use, it is often malleable and dispensable. Rare are the ones who remain firmly rooted in the values when nobody is watching or when challenged. The connection between the values and one’s true identity is not understood at all. Nobody has time for that. Everything is moving at tremendous speed. Today even the mention of a human goal called moksha( spiritual liberation or enlightenment) evokes a response of mockery from most people. It is just not the “in thing”! The goals are entirely different and often obscure. 

What do we call it when a person forgets his/her own true identity? 

Self deception!

A person who lives life with self deception, can he be capable of being honest towards another human being? 

There lies the answer to why and how the society is what it is today. 

Does that mean that the age old values are valueless? 

If you want to simply survive or fit in today’s world, the answer is probably that these values are irrelevant.

But if your goal does not insist on fitting into today’s world and you care to investigate you may discover something extraordinary. 

You may discover that, lo and behold ,what the ancient texts have declared millennia ago is actually true. 

You may find that your true identity is not what you have believed it to be all along. 

And that true identity is incapable of hatred towards anyone. 

That this true self can thrive without too many needs and possessions. 

It needs to prove nothing to anyone. 

It has absolutely no taste in the false narrative that has been the basis of your life thus far. 

Any Indian who understands the meaning of Bharat and lives true to it will be an Indian in my books moving forward. For that matter any individual who understands and lives by the values that constitute the term Bharat or its equivalent in whichever language in the world will be a real human being for me. Others would be simply wannabe humans. 

By this definition most of the population in India today is not Bhartiya at all. That explains to me why the ground realities do not match the image that I have grown up with about India. 

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