I wrote this piece 5 years ago. Surprised though I am by my maturity at that time (I am sure I would not be able to muster even a minute percentage of the same arguments today) I am also shocked by the timelessness of this piece. We are still where we were 5 years ago...
I do not believe in history. My having been born in an upper caste family, with sufficient resources, does not make me great. True, India has a magnificent history: the Indus civilization, the Mughals, the 1857 uprising, the Gandhian revolution, et al. But, likewise, that does not make for greatness.
India is a barren naked land without its cultures, its colors, its religions. However, as a person cannot be deemed great for the clothes he wears; his shoes or hairstyle or the fragrance he chooses to spray over himself, I doubt if greatness should lie in the clothes of cultures, color or monuments India wears. Not only is such a statement highly propagandist (like BJP’s “India Shining” campaign), it deems other nations with perhaps equally diverse cultures, peoples and religions un-great. For greatness is a crown for the elite few. In the same vein, I thus ask, “Why is the US not a great country? Or the UK? Or Pakistan?” Being a citizen of India should not and does not make one blind to the world. After all, this is the era of globalization.
And for all its culture, its history, its religion, its minarets, its color, India like any other country is made of people. Human beings. Little pink creatures, with dark hearts. This is again not a license to greatness, because every country I know of, is made up of human beings.
But I do not intend to deny India greatness…Just to clarify the weights and measures of greatness. The Himalayas, the Ganges, the Taj Mahal, the Qutab Minar with all their quiet beauty and serenity are not the weights and measures of greatness; but of tourism, perhaps.
The man on the street, the rickshaw puller, the tobacco- paan seller, will easily enter into an animated debate on the issue of India’s greatness. To them, all the corruption, the famines (and the Rs. 3 cheques), the electricity shortages, the broken roads, the stinking sewers, peddled to them by their hindi dailies, are signs of a nation gone to the dogs, faltering and staggering and falling.
But the same paan-wallah, the rickshaw puller, will glue themselves to any available radio set if India is playing hockey/ cricket; will talk in higher, happier tones of Sunita Williams, as if she were their blood sister; and celebrate the Indo-US nuclear deal (without being sure of its meaning). Thus is India great, for its people never give up hope. For all our rot and rust and famine and flood, we never stop believing in the Indian dream. Thus, we call her "Mother India" for its peoples are always expecting.
