Are we, Indians, a responsible lot? If yes, how strong is our sense of responsibility? Revathi Siva Kumar attempts to find answers.
In India's 65th Independence year, we can rejoice that at last, she is creeping up the list of the world's future powerhouses.
What an achievement, even if just projected (no project, though. Not even a projected project.) In a country of 1.22 billion and still counting, taking responsibility for every speculative achievement is nice, especially as there are no real ones.
Still, the question remains: Are Indians a responsible people? My young neighbour Rina asked, tearful, about the choked road outside: "So much garbage, so much pollution, noise, poverty, child labour, corruption and crowding. And no one is doing anything about it. Why aren't we a responsible nation?"
I thought a bit, and then gave her a firm answer. "Of course we are," I told her. "Do not forget that we raised our below-poverty-line (BPL) threshold from Rs 25 to Rs 32 in just a week last year."
She was staggered. "Really? How did we improve our poverty levels so quickly?"
"By shouting on TV. It quickly made the government revise its BPL line."
Still, that dirty road started me thinking. What is this sense of responsibility, and how does it fit Indians?
Quite well, I concluded. Just listen to them talk, and you'll understand why. My neighbour, milkman, yoga master and tax collector — all have divergent and sharply pungent opinions on responsibility. My taxman, while pocketing his graft the other day, gave a lofty speech attacking corruption, while my yoga master looked down in the mouth about garbage on the road, but spoke, without stopping, about the glorious tradition of responsibility in India.
"Look at it this way," said Mukund, my boss. "Maybe we don't have a sense of responsibility. But we did, once. So we will, someday."
I brightened up. Oh yes, definitely. We did. And will. Someday. That magic word on which we swing, perpetually. We lack this, we suck at that. But someday — wait, we are coming. So what if we keep coming, and never come?
Anyway, I realised then how strong our sense of responsibility is. Very. We have such very sound theories of what it isn't and what it shouldn't be, at least. It lights the way — that other way, actually, at which we are always looking.
Most of the speeches we give are wordy, eloquent and colourfully glitter with the best sheen of that borrowed language from across the Mediterranean. But ultimately, it must be said that our speeches about responsibility are just too good to be implemented.
As for those cynics — I would like to direct them to the real Indians — the citizens who are sure that our glorious Indian tradition was paved with great responsibility. It started long ago, with our Indus Valley guys, actually. They really had a smart thing going. From their remains, it's pretty clear that this was the civilisation which was started so that we can take pride in it forever, and cite it whenever anyone accuses us of being irresponsible. "Don't look at us now, look at those Indus-ians," we can claim, proudly. "Look at their streets, their plans, their sense of hygiene, their waste management and political organisation. They symbolise our real sense of responsibility."
Or even perhaps our early Vedic times, our idyllic pastoral ages, when — the liberal Hindu is at great pains to point out — there was no caste except in a loose sense. Just for an easy division of labour, sir, just for convenience. Every Vedic citizen owed the state a great sense of responsibility, after all, especially in conquering and enslaving its native inhabitants.
Even the nifty caste system that was invented later enabled an easy division of labour, so that it could make all Indians universally responsible. It was brilliantly efficient because it ensured that each one took responsibility only for some tasks, and left the rest to...to... the rest. That way, some could concentrate on cleaning up, while the real Indian hero had better things to do. No prizes for guessing what they were — I don't think he knew it either.
But he did pretend to do them so well that he gradually began to believe them himself. Let's take speculating on God, for instance. It was vaguely conceived, hence elaborately defined and expressed through complex ritual chanting and massive lunch consumptions.
What a truly awesome cultural legacy down the ages. Something to celebrate this August, with the tinsel patriotism that goes with parades, paper flags and offkey national anthem trumpeting. While there are thousands of pockets of cultures of millions of static messes, we lipstick our freedom fighters and frame them on walls to watch us litter the road, pockmark the parks, pollute the rivers, kill our female babies and brutalise male ones.
It's not as we don't do our bit. We watch TV, read learned articles and fume at everyone who is accused but not convicted, because sure, everyone else is guilty. Being the TV and Facebook age, every Indian has become courageous and activist. He registers, logs in and 'Like's.
A great step forward, don't you think? We talk. We say. As in the Assam rape case, I was struck very strongly by our sense of responsibility, with so much 'said'. What people said about women's manner of dressing and frequenting bars. What television channels said. What the chief minister of Assam said. What Mamta Sharma said. What The Guardian said, what The New York Times said and what an international poll on how safe women are in India said.
Hence, as you can see, we are no longer silent. We talk, we shout, we pound our fists and Facebook our outrage. Isn't that a step forward? I am sure we will get extremely responsible someday, as I said.