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 The real culprit is actually the educated Indian middle class which has withdrawn from civic life just because `politics’ is `dirty’ and left the colossal system to perish on its own.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.

Hate as a Unifying Force

Hate has always been a powerful unifying force. It is also a productive force, in the sense it produces hysterical mobs, indiscriminate violence and mindless destruction.It produces irrational killings machines. It produces hysterical mobs which kill and ravage mindlessly among Hindus, Muslims, Sihalas, Tamils and well, Maharashtrians. It doesn't mean every Hindu or Muslim or Tamil or Marathi is a fanatic, but it means that most of sensible people in these communities can do very little apart from protesting, to stop these killing machines on rampage. You cannot obviously reason with these fanatics. It also mean that there is a wide-spread implicit and unexpressed support to these killer mobs from the people who are not directly involved in these crimes. As a sensible and rational member of these community, the only choice you have is to avoid being part of covert supporters.

The reason for my recent despair is obviously the lynching of a North Indian person on a Mumbai suburban train.It follows the violent agitation by the Maharashtra Navnirman Sena under inspiration of Raj Thackeray and to say that there is no real link between the two things is to pretend and to prevaricate.The lynching may not have been the act of MNS workers, but the hate campaign against the North Indians launched by the party is definitely a motivating influence.

You saw it in Gujarat of 2002, you saw it in the anti-Sikh genocide of 1984, you saw it in the bloody Tamil- Sihala conflict since the eighties.

What we need to do is to probe deeper into why we love to hate. One school, like psychoanalysis would say that it is instinctual to hate and kill and there is very little we can do about it. The other would be the Leftist approach which would put all the blame of desire to kill on the social inequality. The first one comes closer to `nature' school of personality psychology and the other comes closer to `nurture' school.

I would say that hatred is because of BOTH the things: aggressive instinct and the social context. As if the problem is not simple enough.