If not in six years, today I am scared...

As I write, may be thousands are protesting in Delhi today, braving the spine numbing cold. I have been having thoughts, all sorts, about what the gang-rape incident means to the average women in Delhi, who cannot afford to have a personal car for her safety to travel. So the bus, auto and the metro seem to be for now the only option, for thousands others like me.

Strangely enough, I was in Munirka yesterday and even spotted that ill-fated bus stop from where about two weeks ago, the now deceased 23 year old physiotherapy student who was gang-raped, boarded the bus. I had all sorts of scary thoughts yesterday until the time I was in Munirka.

I have been staying in Delhi for the past six years. When I came here, I was cautioned by family and friends about the perils of staying alone in Delhi. In my initial days I used to stay in Vasant Vihar, a typical plush South Delhi area where streets are mostly deserted, as private cars ply around. I can’t recall of a single evening when I was not escorted back to my PG by my friends, fearing that travelling alone might be a compromise to my safety. I was in Vasant Vihar for 2 years before shifting base to JNU campus.

JNU campus can be called an oasis amidst the sea of turbulence in the capital. Every time I enter inside the main gate, I feel I have returned back safely and unharmed, for the day. But one cannot get cocooned inside JNU all the time. One has professional, cultural and social needs and obligations. Interestingly, in Delhi all three needs are structured upon the issue of safety. If you have to travel, book a flight that flies during the day time, take a train that reaches Delhi in the morning (never after 5 PM!) If you want to hang out with your friends make sure you are back (previously it used to be 8 PM), by (now I guess I myself prefer) 6 PM. And yes, we are talking about a modern, empowered woman who stays in the capital of this country. She is not at all embarrassed to follow a stricture that is tinged with medievalist tradition. Every day my freedom is infringed; my rights are trampled by a fear; my parents’ peace of mind disturbed because they want their daughter to have the best education.

Today I am scared, may be I have not admitted it, but in some corner of my mind, fear lurks large. In six years I have not felt so. I guess a majority of other women in Delhi is constantly living under this scourge of fear, for no fault of theirs. The only fault is - she might be pretty, or she might like to dress in stylish attires or she might resist someone else’s unholy moves.

I have always loved Delhi ever since I came. But I have never admired its breed of populace. At the cost of sounding biased, I would say there is a general lack of respect for women that pervades in majority of North Indian men’s psyche. It is that psyche that makes rape a passable offence, because women in general were never and I presume would never be treated at par.

One cannot have police personnel posted at every signal. It is impossible in a country like India having 1.3 billion people. Police cannot change the psyche of a man. Strong laws? Who will make that law? We have ourselves elected MPs and MLAs who have criminal antecedents, some of whom even have rape charges against them. May be what we need today is a cultural renaissance. It is this culture of subjugation that has shaped men’s psyche, which has captivated and destroyed my freedom. It is this culture which does not let me be myself here. I can only hope my children would have better and safe streets to walk on even at 1 AM at night. But that too is a hope against hope.

This post appeared on 30 December 2012 in 'Ei Samay' ( The Times of India's Bengali newspaper circulated in Kolkata) as a translated version in Bangla. The Bangla version can be accessed here:

http://www.epaper.eisamay.com/Details.aspx?id=1773&boxid=23113921

Introspection...

Seldom can you call a work of non-fiction ‘unputdownable’. The later phrase is reserved for the Dan Browns and the Forsyths. Coming from a historian, a non-fiction, which Ramachandra Guha’s latest offering Patriots and Partisans (2012) is, the phrase ‘unputdownable’ might appear to be an exaggeration for many. But after reading 334 pages, without taking recourse to any in-between fiction to keep the monotony of a non-fictional work at bay, I would say that my using of that phrase ‘unputdownable’ is apt and justified. 

Ramachandra Guha needs no introduction. He can easily be called the country’s leading contemporary historian. Guha has taken historical scholarship to a new height. He is one of those few modern day writers who tickle my grey cells. Although I would not claim to have read every article that he has written so far, yet I would dare say I have read him quite extensively. This is not a book review, let me assure you. Interestingly, what made me optimistic about both Guha and his book was the thought that the liberal voice is still alive and quite hopefully healthy in this country, though not very high in terms of its numerical value, otherwise, I was under the impression that the moderate-liberal has faded into wilderness with the death of Nehru. 

As I devoured his book, introspection stopped the pace of my exercise. I was wondering where do I stand on the issue of 'caste' per se? The introspection was called for, as in one of his Chapters titled 'Hindutva Hate Mail', Guha wrote about the kind of hate mails that he regularly gets from the self-proclaimed champions of the Hindu religion. Guha writes, "Notably all my correspondents were all male, with the exception of one woman. Along with the gender bias is a caste bias. Srivastava, Sharma, Shukla, Rao, Iyer, Gupta-these kinds of surnames recur with regularity in my Inbox" (Guha 2012: 64). What Guha intended to convey is that the upper-caste typically wield the sword of their diatribe against Guha's contestation of Hindu fundamentalism. I pondered over it for long. I realized how four years of stay in JNU oriented my understanding of caste. When I did my Post Graduation from Kolkata, we hardly spared any thought as to which of our class-mates belonged to which caste. It was immaterial and it never mattered who got admitted through a so-called 'quota'. I myself did not know the caste distinctions among the Bengalis. My knowledge was restricted to the fact that the Chatterjees, Banerjees, Mukherjees were Brahmins and I was not a Brahmin, because I was told Ghoshs are 'Kayasth' (never even had any inclination to know what or who is a Kayastha.)

 It was after coming to JNU that I came to know about the many castes and sub-castes in North India. I employed a policy of giving only my name (sans the surname) to the unknown. But that led to queries after queries until finally you satisfied them with an answer which revealed your caste. I have been part of umpteen conversations where if a surname was unconventional, it instantaneously provoked discussions on the various possible options. Here, if one says one has a boy friend, the next reaction is not necessarily "what does your boy friend do?" but quite starkly is - "ek hi caste ke ho na?" What bemused me is the near encyclopaedic knowledge of an average North Indian in JNU on which surname belongs to which caste ! I fail to fathom, how many years have they been tutored to achieve such remarkable proficiency in their caste-analysis exercise ! At the cost of sounding biased, I would dare say that in North India this phenomenon is deeply ingrained. Casteism runs deep here. It would take another 50 years if not 100 for such feudal mindsets to purge itself of its feudal overtones. I feel good each time I think that I was born in a much liberal environment, where I was not taught to differentiate between castes, I feel good that it was not imperative for me to know which caste did a Mitra, Bose, Sen or Sarkar belonged to. However, it is an irony that now I know which surname falls in the 'reserved category'.

Discrimination and differentiation does not bring a befuddled expression in me now. I have become ambivalent to the 'caste paradigm'. But what makes me happy is the very thought that I would not pass this pool of knowledge which restricts the identity of an individual to his caste, to my kids.

Lets talk about love

Love is around the corner once again. Cometh February and cometh the hour. I have had endless and some really prosaic discussions and even read reams of articles on why we should or should not celebrate Valentine’s day. People have scorned off at the idea of accommodating something that’s out and out western into our long cherished cultural idiosyncrasies that is so typically branded as Indian. One thing I have observed (strangely though !) that each time we loose our forte in a debate we never loose time in falling back to the time tested law of harping on the finesse of Indian culture. What is Indian culture per se for that matter ? We can have a separate debate someday on Indian culture and its value laden ambiguities which nobody really can fathom out. At least I could not.

However, not divulging from the topic on Valentine’s Day, I have always wondered what is the harm in celebrating it? People have come out with the logic that you can’t have one specially sanctioned day for love. They argue (and often boisterously!), does it mean that you don’t love the remaining 364 days? I humbly get into the tenacity to question that logic. We do celebrate Mother’s day, Father’s day or for that matter Independence day. My inbox gets flooded with messages on “Bharat mata ki Jai” and “Jai Hind” on Independence day. So does it mean that you remember and pay your obeisance to your country only on 15th August and the rest of the days you don’t even give a damn about her? Or is 15th August the only day ordained by law, where you have the license to be zealously patriotic? It is not like that. It is just that on that special one day, you show how “specially important” is your motherland to you ? That, you take time off atleast, when you turn on your TV early in the morning, to hear the PM speak from the ramparts of the Red Fort, to say that you remember its 15th August, even though you forget which year of independence you were celebrating ! We still love to buy a small replica of our national flag on the eve of 15th August, which the street children sell at the traffic signals and still love to wave it like a kid, even though we have long crossed that age when we were kids and ran from one room to another with that flag held in our little palms. So what is the harm on 14th Feb to show that special someone that you love them, may be a bit more than yesterday ? And by no stretch of imagination I hereby say that Valentine’s Day is just a day of showing love to your girl friend/boy friend. Love and patriotism are nothing but emotions. And when it comes to emotions why tuck its leash ?

Love is not easy to define. It is even harder to express. But it is perhaps most necessary to unmoor it. If you cannot define it, cannot express it in words, you should figure a way out to show that you care. For every relationship it is very important.

I have very seldom seen someone buying those silly hearts made of those red roses, but honestly speaking there is no escape or immunity from the expectations that is generated on Valentine’s Day. This is what a Sunday magazine wrote about the significance of 14th Feb:

“The news is about Valentine’s Day protests, the food section is about aphrodisiacs, the travel section about romantic getaways, the books section about love and poetry. You have, absorbed so many words and images about love, in so many direct and oblique ways, that you are pushed to pay some thought to your own love life.”

In school, once I read a piece by William Somerset Maugham, titled ‘On my Seventieth Birthday’. The line that I still remember the most, from that piece is- “Old age hath its compensations.” What now I understand the most from that line is that every age has its own compensations. But every age has its own meaning too. There was a time when the tinkering of the bell in the hot summer afternoon by the local kulfi wala meant a straight jump out of your afternoon sleep into the sultry street. There was a time when just a look at your crush would make your heart jump a beat. There would also be a time when Valentine’s day would loose its sheen, when you would just not find anyone to wish you happy Valentine’s day and give you a warm hug. May be its then you would understand how special it feels to be loved on the day when the whole world revels in love. It has always been that way. We never care about the things we have. It is only when you are left to moan about a thing you don’t have, that you realize how important it was to you.

I know you cannot have a specific day for love. But you can always have a perfect alibi to do that. Archies gives you that leeway. Don't buy that extra expensive soft teddy from the nearby Archies gallery. Shun that on 14th Feb ! Atleast can buy a rose from the roadside flower vendor. That would be much ‘Indianized’ way to profess love. There is no denying the fact that we all love to be made to feel special and that is true irrespective of the gender. This is not an article to show how hopelessly romantic I am trying to be. This is just an effort to tell that not every day you become the reason for somebody else’s smile (whoever that is). But when given a chance that you can be on one day, don’t miss the opportunity in trying to be stoic to score some brownie points and guffaw at the idea of how some people love to be emotional fools on this day. Mark my words- there is no joy as serene in this world than to be the reason for somebody’s smile.

HAPPY VALENTINE’S DAY !

“With malice towards none…”

If in the past all my blog posts were well accepted, one thing for sure, till you finish this post, I will be chastised and loathed for my audacity to be honest. But I don’t mind if obituaries are written for me for being honest. Thank God that I don’t have a Publisher to please; otherwise if writing was my means of livelihood, for this article I would have had to sacrifice my job. But this is my blog and so I have the luxury to have the liberty to give vent to my ideas, uncensored!

Few days back a friend’s status message on Gtalk read like this: “Does setting up attractive status message shows someone's character in any sense OR people try to attain faaltu ka attention!!!” I kept on pondering on those lines. The word that struck me was “ATTENTION”. Was questioning myself, how many of us would really not like to have attention? This ‘attention deficit syndrome’ or ‘hyper attention disorder’ (these are terms coined by me and I am not aware whether such terms trace its origin to Psychology or Sociology) is the most common ailment human beings suffer from. And with the coming of the new age concept of ‘social-networking’ I think this ailment is finding its most visible manifestation.

I always consider this idea of social-networking as ‘self-networking’. It is the most appropriate platform for self-eulogy and self glorification. Truth is we all are narcissists. Only the extent differs. And social networking today is the most visible reflection of this narcissism. Mark Zuckerberg (for the uninitiated, he is the founder of Facebook) is the most intelligent man on earth today. He understood this logic of narcissism so well. And as a reward for this understanding and intelligence, Facebook today has over 500 million active users as of July 2010 (Source: Wikipedia). For that matter other social networking sites like Orkut and Twitter are also cashing on this logic of narcissism.

Day after day as I log in and scan through the pages of my account in Orkut/Facebook/Twitter what I come across is some unnecessary information that makes no difference in my life. But it does make a difference to other people, because it gives them publicity and helps them acquire a cult-status (of course not according to me, but its self-professed). What I fail to reason is how is buying a ‘X’ TB Hard disk drive going to help the people in your friend list ? And surprisingly this has been a status update. I have even seen status updates that say “bought a new blah blah phone with blah blah GB space and blah blah Mega pixel camera!!” Can anyone enlighten me as to what will I do with all these useless information?? The only idea that this kind of updates convey to me is that ‘look my phone/HDD/camera is new and swanky and comes for a hefty price and you don’t have one!” What would you call it then? Isn’t it narcissism? (Otherwise I don’t find any logic behind that update. Pardon my naivety in that regard.)

Let me share with you yet another instance of narcissism galore. There are people I know who the first thing they do when they are transferred to a foreign country (for any reason-job, marriage, project, education) is update the ‘Current City’ option of their accounts. For example, if someone is transferred to say New York or London or Paris, they would immediately update their “current city” option even before their flight takes them to their current city! But strikingly the same pace is not followed when some one is transferred from say Bangalore to Delhi or for that matter from New Jersey to New Delhi! I am not conjuring up stories from thin air. I have made these observations and I am writing it from my own experiences in this unreal world of social networking.

My innocent querry is that what are we trying to prove out of this silly publicity? I know and most of us know that all of us love attention. But what is the rationale behind such blatant narcissism? I have seen people upload bizarre pictures in their albums. Pictures which convey nothing but yet are fashion statements. What is the logic of having a profile picture where you are grabbing your husband or your husband is grabbing you until you or your husband choke of asphyxiation? Does that convey your love which is immeasurable or the lack of it in which case the picture bears testimony to that realization? Have we all lost our private world? Is this unreal world of social-networking everything? Does everything that happens to us need to be made public EXPLICITLY? Do we really do things keeping in mind what others would think about it or do we still do things using our own heads?

May be I am a misfit in this strange world of self-marketing. But I am happy that I have a world of my own with my loved ones where I share my dreams with them. That is all mine. I have established a ‘Firewall security’ for that world. Interestingly some of my closest friends are not even in my friends list in Orkut/Facebook. I don’t want to be known by how many followers/ friends I have. It conveys nothing to me. And I don’t experience any joy or pride in bragging that “I have bought a phone” or “going for a holiday in Singapore” or “I have completed my so and so degree.”

When I joined Twitter I had X number of followers and today I might be having X+X number of followers, but how does it matter to me ? My world does not revolve around these ‘Virtual Friends’. Tweets mentioning going for blah blah meeting, shooting for blah blah movie, gave a blah blah speech or inaugurated a blah blah auditorium are nothing but mindless mementoes of trying to rise from mediocrity. I used to follow Tharoor, Shahrukh and many such stars. But eventually I lost interest in their tweets because it has nothing but information about their daily schedules and LOVE YOU ALL, HUGS TO ALL-type messages. I want to learn and status messages like these portray nothing but insensible narcissism.

So readers (both friends and anonymous) bash me, hate me or criticize me after reading this post, cause I know for a post like this more brickbats would be laid than bouquets ( because if not all, there would be some who would fall in any one of the above mentioned categories of narcissists !). But I am not a ‘please all’ type of a character.Social networking can and should be used for connecting with the society.Explicit narcissism would defeat the entire idea behind 'networking' and would eclipse the essence of the word 'social'.

A Route to Life...

Amidst the hullabaloo of the soccer mania that has swept us in the past one month, a recurring theme occupied my mind and at times went to the extent of intriguing whatever logical scaffoldings my brain could construct all these years. A very good friend of mine who time and again tickles my brain cells with his logical reasoning on a wide gamut of issues, on this particular occasion supplied the food for thought. He kept on asking me what keeps us so excited about the FIFA World Cup, when our own country was not participating.

I am a cricket enthusiast like any other ordinary Indian. Although I won’t say that I don’t understand football, but given a choice between cricket and football, I would go for cricket any day. So what makes India predominantly a cricket loving and cricketer worshiping nation loose sleep over the FIFA World cup? How does one explain the phenomenon of Indians being so much engrossed in a World Cup where India is not a participating nation?

I tried hard to fathom out the reasons behind such a craze. For once it appeared that the idea of nation and nationalism is passé now. Scratching my head, I thought that Benedict Anderson was right when he said that nations are nothing but ‘imagined communities’. So it does not matter whether you are an Indian working in USA, or a Pakistani studying in UK, you still have something to cheer for, as you became a Brazilian or for that matter an Argentine for this World Cup. It was as if globalization had erased the idea of nationalism from our memories. But that argument does not hold forte because the boundaries are still clearly chalked out on maps and border issues still happen to be one of the pertinent causes of inter-state conflicts and a strong sense of nationalism still pervade among the countries that are fighting it out in the football field there in South Africa. Glimpses of historical rivalries come to the fore when one thinks of a Germany Vs England match or for that matter an Indo-Pak hockey or cricket match.

Next argument that I tried to eke out was that Indians love to have an opinion on every issue under the sun. So be it football World Cup, or Wimbledon or for that matter F1 racing, we love to have ‘our team’ and fight it out with fellow Indians on the strength or weaknesess of our favourite team and try and snub the other out with stats as to how a particular player scored a goal from a particular angle on a particular match, or how Sharapova has a better back-hand or how Lewis Hamilton won pole position in the Spanish Grand Prix ! That argument made some sense but I was still not fully satisfied that it was ‘the reason’ beyond the hightened enthusiasm of the maddening Indian crowd towards the football fever.

It was only yesterday while watching the Germans loose the semi-final match against Spain, it struck me as to why were we so frenzied about the World Cup where there was no team representing India, my country. It is not about the spirit of nationalism, or enthusiasm about sports (Of course, for the numerous football enthusiasts this football World Cup is an event extraordinaire. And I am not speaking for them. My arguments are for the masses for whom football means only World Cup Football). It is about finding a way out of the monotonous life where your mornings begin with the dreadful thought of meeting a client, or meeting a deadline to submit a project report or for students to appear for the weekly tests. Such small little events makes us laugh, cry, fight and the feeling that sweeps us all through this phase is one of enjoyment. Forgetting the mundane mechanized moribund life for a moment we try to escape to a place where thrill and excitement awaits us. After all what is life without thrill! So in the past one month we got up in the morning thinking how the Brazilian side would thrash its opponents or how Germany would annihilate Argentina. And trust me these feelings made the days more exciting and the wait more fulfilling. Every time ‘your side’ won, the sleep at night after 2 am was so peaceful !

Interestingly I too allowed myself to get inundated with the football mania. My profile on Orkut and Facebook bore a German jersey all the while. The intense rivalry on the various social networking sites was only pointers to the fact that the excitement was palpable and it gave the Indians a chance to sneak a welcome break from their tight schedules. While hedging bets on the prospect of his/her team for a particular match, the first thing that came to people’s mind was that what should be an apt update for his/her Facebook account today? Or each time our team lost, the initial reaction was how people would make a fun on Facebook ! And all these, did precipitate some fervor of excitement in our routinized life. So, whether David Villa wins a Golden Boot or not on 12th July, we already had some golden moments all the while. Moments that made us revel in glory or regret in defeat and that too not for the Indian team but ‘our team’. That’s our own world where we live for ourselves all within us. I think now I have an answer. Its not escapism, it’s a route to enjoy and live life. All of us have one life, my advice is, rediscover that forgotten path time an again, that will make you smile and forget for a moment that life is nothing but a long arduous walk. Live life and not let life leave you…

Dividing Lines

Millions in India woke up to a different news story this 1st of Jan 2010. Families in India whose morning begin with the usual Indian cup of tea and the evergreen ‘Times of India’, this 1st of Jan had an interesting news item to make that cup of morning tea even more relishing- "Aman ki Asha" - the latest venture by The Times of India and The Jang group of Pakistan. It is a bold initiative to, as they call it “…energize the process of peace between India and Pakistan.” Incidentally, India-Pakistan relations happen to be a case study of my research. I have tried to be as objective as possible in this quest to understand the intricacies of their relations. Sometimes research is not about reading twenty odd books and describing the facts which have already been captured in those pages of the book. Research is also about talking to people to understand and analyze an issue closely. After reading the Times of India, every individual I spoke to was upbeat about this initiative. One even went to the extent of saying, “could not have expected a better article for the first day of the year than this.”

It was not my intention to write on a topic as clichéd and controversial (especially if you are in the sub-continent) as India-Pakistan relations as a comeback article for my blog, after months of stoic silence. But I could not help vent out my disappointment at the way the two sides are hooked into a war of words. On the one side we talk about an initiative like Aman ki Asha and on the other side we have repeated diatribes hurled against the political establishments of the two countries by the political elites,thanks to the recent IPL controversy. All through the years of discord between India-Pak, it was sports and cultural diplomacy that provided some hope of a common chord amidst the political maze riddled in the haze of suspicion. Now unfortunately its sports that has stirred a hornet’s nest and awakened the hawks in the foreign policy establishment of both the countries. The doves have been driven away in the cacophony of conflict largely due to the baggage of history.

I still remember how cricket was an uniting force in 2004 when our PM Dr.Manmohan Singh and the the then Pak President General Musharraf together saw the cricket test match between India-Pakistan in Islamabad. Most of you will also agree with me when it comes to the thrill of an India-Pakistan cricket match.But now cricket divides us. The IPL controversy has had its ‘cascading effect’. And this conjures up a dismal picture for many Pakistanis and Indians like me who believe that tit-for-tat strategy will never hold water.An example of the cascading effect- Pakistani govt. has cancelled the scheduled visit of its team of the Election Commission and Parliamentarians to attend the diamond jubilee celebrations of our Election Commission in India.Even in the Jaipur Literary Festival,sparks flew among the dignitaries from both the countries,with Aasma Jehangir,Chairperson of the Pakistan Human Rights Commission saying openly,"how would you feel if we did the same?" Really,what would have been the Indian reaction had Indian cricketers not been granted visa by Pakistan ? Commoners in India and Pakistan swear by cricket.For them Afridi is more popular than a Matthew Hayden.Who then is responsible for this IPL decision,which would have always had political repercussions ? All of a sudden are all the Pakistanis players out of form ? Why no takers then ? I have never been a supporter of the IPL particularly.It has institutionalized the commercialization of sports in India.When sports like hockey and athletics are cash starved,look at the price a cricketer is paid for the IPL season. And now the IPL is vitiating the relation between India and Pakistan.Why cant some sensibility prevail in our gestures ? Was it not enough for terrorism to stop the forward movement of our ties that now even sports is acting as a speed breaker. For both the countries,defense has already eaten into our developmental expenditures for long.Lets not channelize the funds that could be for bread towards the guns.As Amitabh Bacchan says in one of the ads for Aman ki Asha- "...in lakidon ko zameen par hi rehne do,dilon pe mat khichon..." ( let these lines be there on the ground and not in our hearts).When Rahat Fateh Ali Khan and Kailash Kher; Hari Haran and Ghulam Ali Khan can pitch their voices together for peace why turn the cricket pitch into a war ? Necessity is to wage a war against war...a war for peace.

Interpreting Misperceptions

I am back from my slumber after a month ! There were a whirlwind of thoughts in my mind but not enough zeal perhaps to capture them and weave them into a presentable article for my blog.Today after a self-inflicted drubbing,i told my laptop and my brain,"Chal dhanno aj tere izzat ka sawal hain" ( that was an example of my bad humor ! Sorry ! ). Jokes apart,getting back to serious issues,newspapers and magazines in the past few weeks have been innundated with "Raj-Thackeray Mania". Those articles made an interesting read,i must say.After all, sensationalizing an issue calls for immense talent. Even interesting is the fact that people really fall prey to such tactics.Let me share with you all a personal experience. I have a very good marathi friend and some of my other friends know it.One of my school friends cautioned me the other day of being careful of dealing with the marathis ! I mean that was an outrageous comment for me to digest.Thanks for your advice my friend,but i am a grown up lady and i have a head on my shoulder and that head knows (thanks to God's grace !)how to differentiate. Concern for someone is a different thing and having a blinkered mentality is something different.That comment (for him it was an advice though) did not go well with me. What i fail to fathom is how can we, all of a sudden equate all marathis as being supporters of Raj Thackeray ? This for me is a blatant example of stupidity.Why does Raj Thackeray come to people's mind first and not Hemant Karkare ? I just pity these people who have done and are doing so. Why do we take extreme positions ? Its just like equating all Muslims as terrorists,all Tamilians as supporters of the now extinct LTTE.

Most of us donot know that in the post election coverage of Maharashtra elections aired on various news channels,most of the Marathi journalists present in the TV studios did not support MNS's divisionary tactics. They were of the opinion that Maharashtra has far more substantive issues facing its polity than the issue of 'Marathi-manoos' only.But who cares to understand them.How many of us know about the farmer suicides in Vidharba,sugar problems in western Maharashtra ? May be only 10 % are aware about it.The rest know Maharashtra's politics only through Raj Thackeray, i guess. Thats appalling !

The recent attack on the SP MLA Abu Hashmi during the swearing-in ceremony of the newly formed Maharashtra Assembly,attracted huge media and common people's attention.The issue was again one of the omnipresent issues that has marred our polity - LANGUAGE POLITICS.Abu Hashmi wasnot allowed to take his oath in Hindi by MNS supporters. So many people whom i spoke to were spitting venom saying how can they do so when Hindi is the national language ? Well, for such ignorant Indians let me state it very clearly that our Constitution doesnot mention about a national language in any of its articles.It says Hindi is our OFFICIAL language and not the national language (Go and check Article 343(1) of the Indian Constitution,if doubt still persists). Even i strongly condemn what the MNS supporters did to disrupt the oath taking ceremony but i would like to point out that lets not whip up national sentiments taking recourse to wrong legal knowledge.At the same time i am intrigued to ask myself and to all the enlightened individuals who might read this post-what would the situation be like had some MLA say in any South Indian legislature taken oath in say Urdu ? Or had any MLA in J& K taken oath in Bengali ?

Few weeks later after the Abu Hashmi incident,we had Sachin Tendulkar taking a stand in saying that he is proud to be a Maharashtrian but he is an Indian first.I was glad that Sachin did come forward to save the Marathis being typecast as MNs afficionados. And when Sachin comes to bat,you cannot have a new lad bowling.So exit junior Thackeray and enter the senior Thackeray to topple his wicket ! Now again people started thinking that even Sachin is batting for the marathis,so is it right to brand all the marathis as bad ? I think we have this perennial problem of generalization. This has happened time and again.When in school,i saw how mothers cautioned their children from speaking to Kashmiri shawl vendors in my neighborhood.Reason- Kashmir was bleeding red due to terrorism,so who knows,it might be that the ordinary Kashmiri shawl vendor was masquerading as a terrorist ! When i was in college, Godhra and Gujarat riots happened and again the same thing followed- every Gujarati was labelled a Modi sympathizer ! Now its all so common to equate every Muslim as being a supporter of either the Al Quaida or the LeT. Not only that, even now, every Pakistani is seen as being hellbent in destroying India ! How many of us know that the bodies of the Pakistani terrorists involved in 26/11 are still lying in the morgues of the various Mumbai hospitals, as the Indian muslims have not agreed to give them an Islamic burial.Nobody knows about it,because that story doesnot smell sensational.

Raj Thackeray cannot be said to be the spokesperson of all Marathis,just like Mirwaiz Omar Farooq (Chairman of the Moderate Hurriyat faction) cannot claim to represent ordinary Kashmiri voices from J&K.MNS has won only 13 seats in the newly constituted Maharashtra Assembly.And they have won from some paricular pockets of Maharashtra,i.e., Mumbai-Thane region.That happens in every state.We have specific bastions for a political party, wherein its electoral strength is the highest.That has been a characteristic feature of the voting pattern in Indian elections over the years.

What surprised me the most was the fact that when Bal Thackeray was criticizing Sachin for not being a true Maharashtrian,there was no protest.Even when the Shiv sainiks in Pune attacked IBN-Lokmat's (IBN Lokmat is the Marathi wing of CNN-IBN) office in protest against Nikhil Waghle's remarks on Bal Thackeray,there was no protest from the commoners.My question is why this apathy now ? Is it because in this two battles it was the Marathis on both sides of the fence ? So the rest of the people who were making noises on the question of 'Marathi-North Indian divide' had no stake in this battle royale ? Isnt it hipocrisy then ? I mean if the issue of linguistic chauvinism is an important issue that is connected to the health of the polity,then the question of freedom of speech and expression and also the freedom of the press in free India is as vital an issue as the former.But here surprisingly we found a stoic silence.Here is my problem with the masses. We become judgemental very fast.Forming an opinion on any issue is good,but jumping into a conclusion without sufficiently weighing in the pros and cons is dangerous.That will give us a skewed perception about the issue and that doesnot augur well for the health of our polity.