Thursday, December 4, 2008

CLEANING OUR OWN CRAP

India is reeling under the aftershocks of the most devastating terrorist attack on the country and the educated Indian middle class, who maintains a cynical indifference to the real democratic processes, has taken to `Neta Bashing’ in a big vulgar way. The media is the most vociferous in this pass time. The real culprit is actually the educated Indian middle class which has withdrawn from civic life just because `politics’ is `dirty’ and left the colossal system to perish on its own. It was Gandhi who wanted to teach the middle class Indians to clean their own toilets, both literally and metaphorically. Only if we had picked up better things from him, instead of the whole charkha business. It is our society and we should not have allowed the crap to pile up and stink. So guys, move your big ass and start cleaning.....


Incidentally, it is the centenary of ` Hind Swaraj’ the Bible of Gandhians and the Gandhians all over the place will have a massive attack of Gandhi bhakti. I don’t take Hind Swaraj very seriously. It is a Palaeolithic social philosophy which wishes to turn the clocks of time back to the Stone Age. Though History can be repeated, I don’t think it can be rewinded. Gandhians have a hard time realizing that there is no such thing as noble savage because if there actually were such a thing, they would not have taken to something as cheap and depraved as civilization.

Gandhi occasionally did have good insights like the idea about cleaning our own crap, but he was too much of a lawyer to understand philosophy and too much of a philosopher to understand law. Consequently, he took to what he did the best- politics and sainthood. Neither of the profession attracts me, however, because in both of the professions, you have to live your entire life pretending to be what others believe you to be. I am sure it is not very easy, but some people seem to enjoy doing that because of all the attention they get.