By Anshu Choudhry
“Art is individualism and individualism is a disturbing and
disintegrating force. There lies its immense value. For what it seeks is to
disturb monotony of type, slavery of custom, tyranny of habit, and the reduction
of man to the level of a machine.” – Oscar Wilde
 |
| Anshu Choudhry |
It has been a few
months, when, while walking past the sand scattered orange pathways around the
India Gate, I had felt a twinge of emotion, an impulsive regret for the names
that lay engraved over the golden walls, much like graves scattered through a
populated cemetery. A decade ago though,
the thought of comparing India Gate to a cemetery would have come across as
blasphemous to my ritualistic mind. During my school days, it did not even
represent the martyrs. It was an edifice, a temple proclaiming the religion of patriotism,
alive and daring, intimidating the enemy with its flame of truth, valor and
sacrifice burning bright.
So what had
changed, I asked my pessimistic self. Why the sacrifice of our soldiers did
seem such a waste? The question haunted me in sleep even as I consciously tried
to fight away the demonic thoughts disparaging my country and its greatness.
The days that followed turned me into a thinking machine (if it is of the shape
and style of old gramophones) with a needle pointedly stuck on the events that
define the aura and the era of India @ 70. Not at all an old hag; rather a
coquettish, animated woman at the peak of youth philandering with the most
eligible suitors, enchanting them to her own advantage, living herself,
developing her yet under-developed talents in her quest to maximize herself.
So, what was wrong after all in maximizing the self, even if it requires the
sounding of siren of dissent, even if it is a sectarian call for fractioning
the country, even if it amounts to anti-nationalism, even if this individualism
threatens the very unity for which the martyrs reduced themselves to mere
carvings on a yellow stone?
I have been no
different from my earnest brothers and sisters in revering my country as the
mother, the Bharat Mata and have rather felt proud in this feminine depiction
of the land of my birth. Surprisingly, all along, the somber, submissive and silent
suffering image of the Indian mother subdued my imagination of one with the
potential of an aggressive feminine force, a selfish ambition jettisoning the
selfless surrender. Perhaps this evolution of perception was long due, perhaps
it was waiting in the wings to appear centre stage, perhaps we, the children
could not feel the undercurrents of change as we mass mobilized not for a
collective non-cooperation or civil-disobedience, but to assert and
authenticate our individuality, our uniqueness, our singularity in the more
than 134 billion faces that we now are.
The rash energy in
the air is palpably triggering a restive beat in pining hearts; a fierce
ambition is tearing through each soul aiming not for the elusive ‘nirvana’ from afterlives but the search
for the absolute best in this one life. 70 years ago was the era of achievement
with freedom from foreign powers as the reward. Patriotism was the guiding
value leading to the salvation of the soul. In this day and age, the
inspiration is to fulfill the individual life. Each and every soul is unique,
each body special, born for a higher purpose than that of another; each
superior to the other, thus inspiring freedom from another. The passive force
of self-effacing, reticent masses, the conglomerates of common cause, the march
of the downtrodden is long since dissipated. It is now the stimulus of the
individual sense. Very much like the American Dream, the Indian fantasy is
vying to give shape to a new reality. Old histories of class, caste and
ethnicity seek erasure by the very fact of their millennia long existence or
better still are aggressively striving to overturn the nomenclatures and
definitions of inferior vs. superior.
The common cause,
if any, has a measured shelf-life akin to the hedonistic impulse that ignites and
dies a spark. The anti-corruption campaign that promised the resurgence of
another Mahatma, the Nirbhaya case protests and many other agitations mushroom
and wither away at the end of the angry season much like the brief spell of a
scanty rain inoculating the minds such that instead of fighting such demons, we
are left desensitized to their presence, adapting them as the necessary evils
by putting them to good use for our own individual benefits. In these
competitive times of depleted resources, none has the nerve or the energy
against solipsism and to stop and ponder the future consequences for the
generations to come.
Often at times,
while driving to work, I use the leisure forced by a traffic jam to reminiscence
on the scene of a metropolitan road. The bumper to bumper gridlock traffic best
describes the chaos that has taken roots by this stubborn insistency for the
self. The vehicle is the king on the piece of land it happens to occupy at the
particular moment. Under-age riders scoot around dashing into each other like
villains striking in Xbox games. Hardly a pavement exists for pedestrians,
these having become the private domains of makeshift shopkeepers whom the
authorities dare not evacuate in their sincere duty to the illegitimate
earnings. The rulers have devised flexible ideals, pompous egos, and shallow
self-respects, to keep in tandem with the amoeba shaped vote-bank that rules
supreme in today’s polity and economy. Poverty is glorified not by reason of
empathy or alleviation but for the large numbers of votes it has on offer. It
is no wonder then that an individual bleeds to death and no one notices him or
the car that rammed him; and if at all it is worth a scene, it need only be
digitally captured as a feature for a WhatsApp message or a Facebook post. The
civic sense is nearly dead, down in the grave, awaiting a burial like a garbage
dump ready for bio-degradation. And so is the earth sense even though every now
and then we shoot off newly developed missiles in the atmosphere to scare off
the unknown enemy. The ravished flora and fauna, landslides, floods,
environmental calamities, are just a few of the many wounds on the face of
Indian soil inflicted by the exponential growth of human population. Various
other inherent senses of the Indian fraternity—the filial sense, reverence to
women, care for the elderly, family ties are certainly on the decline if not
decimated.
While it is indeed
a grave loss to lose some of the senses; paradoxically, a few such losses can
be a boon. I attribute the dilution of the mass sense to such a blessing. With
a sliver of hope, I feel the quiver, the mild tremor and an arrhythmic shiver
from this mass instinct of feminine submission characterized by the ‘Indian
woman’, the quintessential ‘Bhartiya nari’. Once a label of pride, the
attributes of nobility and aristocracy no more hide under this suffocating
veil. I do not and never will mourn the loss of this insidious tag on my
motherland which has done more harm than good to the mothers and sisters who
suffered under its confines. When earning a livelihood, opting for manual
labor, educating the girl child was outrageous behavior, when disobedience to a
scalawag husband was a sin, when not having a husband at all was an offence,
when widows, single mothers and the non-existent divorcees were not supposed to
exist, when it was a woman’s fault to be barren or to be abandoned by a man – those
days are pass├й. The last seventy years have ensured that these dogmas and
doctrines imposed on the ‘Bhartiya nari’ have slowly but surely
atrophied giving way to the emergence of a desperate if not confident woman who
hardly has a choice, but to make a choice. It is encouraging to see that a
slum-dweller vies for a house like the one she cleans for a living; her daughter
needs be educated to be a professional like her own mistress for whom she works
and her son is motivated to be like the CEO driven around in the car that her
husband drives.
Despite the loss
of idealism, the last seventy years has given India the coveted phenomenon
called hope. This hope is being reflected not just through the feminine force
but through the isolated Indians who toil tirelessly with integrity. It is
widely accepted in Government circles that less than ten percent of the work
force is honest and dutiful and yet this ten percent minority makes the
government work. Ironically, if it were not for these petty fellows, the
remaining ninety percent would not get away with their corrupt, reckless
misadventures, the loot that they perpetrate on the country every now and then
in the form of nasty scams. The ten percent minority truly value and cherish
the freedom endowed upon us by our freedom fighters and defended by the martyrs
listed on India Gate. These honest, alienated
individuals, each a vertebra to the backbone of the country, sequestered
from the coteries, lobbies and closed groups of
hunched power brokers, inspire hope for an erect future—that perhaps
they will inspire others and one day will make India stand the tallest amongst
the global community.
Already this hope
is being manifested through our seventy year old vibrant democracy which is
throwing up change in unexpected quarters. Centurial political parties that had
mass appeal are bowing before individual apathy. Individual interests are now
deciding political elections and alliances. Caste and class equations governed
by communities are turned upside down by the weight of the individual vote that
is now cast with a personal agenda of development for the self. No doubt the
churn heavy with the 134 billion individual aspirations is whipping up novel,
unexpected amalgamations by mingling and co-mingling diverse, dissenting,
regional, religious, cultural, economic differences to create a new identity
for India that stands apart not isolated, but recognized and admired for its
individualistic stance. India is no longer just towing the line marked by
superpowers or following diminutively the world leaders. She no more represents
the obsequious masses on the international stage, eager to please the
condescending rich countries or appease the rogue nations who once threatened fragile
unity.
She is now a proud
country where each of the 134 billion people are seeking to have an individual independent voice, aspirations,
opinions and above all, the confidence and the power to change our fate and
also the world. The next time I visit India Gate, I am sure the martyrs will
accept a bow if not a salute from my humbled, enlightened, individual sense
that has cast away its doubts.
