Last few days have been rather interesting, for professional
reasons I got an opportunity to spend a lot of time with some budding leaders
& some national/international ones. Coming from a very liberal household, ‘
Nationalism ‘, ‘ Hindutva ‘ ‘ Religious fanatics ‘ are all pretty strange to me. But as life is a compilation
of amazing experiences, the last few days have surely got me thinking in many
ways.
One of the topics was the British ‘Raj’, and our thoughts
about it. In my humble opinion the only reason majority of ‘ Desi Crowd ‘ is so
angry with the ‘ English ‘ is that the ‘ Father of the Nation ‘ never disclosed
his love towards ‘ Our Mother wearing the Crown ‘ (the intelligent will
understand the metaphorical pun intended, the fanatics can shoot me if they
want).
Yup I am bravely referring to the man on every Indian currency
note, Son of a senior Govt (yup his dad worked for the ‘ Raj ‘) official,
educated in a fine law school in London. In fact all that he wanted in that train
Cabin in south Africa was to be treated like a ‘Gentle Man‘ (a British concept).
So why do the history books make the breakup sound like a
major achievement. Like seriously our constitution (which we apparently live by
in India) Is a cut & paste of what Thomas Babiton Macaulay a British poet
and politician penned down with a bottle of sherry on his way to the ‘ Indian
sub continent ‘.
This is where the ‘hindu rashtra’ fanatics would start
jumping up & down, claiming that its not true, and we all should wear
saffron n speak Hindi. Well what about the rest of the country which is not ‘
Uttar Pradesh ‘ & ‘ Bihar ‘.
Yes there are other amazing languages in India too. But the way we
communicate officially interstate wise is English.
Lets just say you were proud to be Indian, well in that case
since ‘ India ‘ is a very British concept (just like ‘ Hinduism ‘ yup you
saffron fanatics, this term was first researched by a English scholar Sir John
Woodroffe, who found its mention in some sanskrit literature ' Rajataranginis ' written by a
Kashmiri gentleman Kalhana ), you could not be anti – English. Starting
from the constitution all the way to Cricket, it has imprints of foreign
influence. No matter how proud we are of our Independence movement, we cannot
say the British left, governments might come and go, but cultures remain.
What we Indians love most ‘ Tea ‘ n ‘ Cricket ‘, could we be
more British?
So why the anger? My guess is, the anger is towards the ‘
Raj ‘ our mother who never claimed us after we killed our Father. We feel like
‘ Karan ‘ (Mahabharat reference), the lack of belonging to the huge empire made
us grow angry. Grow a fake pride against the inventor of most of our
definitions.
‘ God save the queen, and once she is saved, please ask her
to save us ‘.
