They have made a new movie. Slumdog Millionaire. It has won a couple of Golden Globe awards and has been nominated for a cartload of Academy awards. It has been hailed as one of the very best Indian movies. I am not going to watch it. I will explain why, and no this post is not about me bashing this movie.
One of the people involved with the production of this movie said with quite a bit of pride, “there has been a general trend to glorify India or sanitize India, in Slumdog, we have done neither”. Whether showing India's stark and filthy reality is a matter of pride or not, I am not going to discuss. (And to the patriotic ones who are going to mail me about “India's stark and filthy reality”, the garbage strewn back alleys of Mumbai and the heaps of urban refuse can hardly be called anything other than filthy).
I wrote this post to focus on an aspect of India that has been pushed to the sidelines thanks to our infatuation with crime, grime, corruption, destitution, failure and everything else that is negative. Yes our politicians are corrupt slobs, yes almost all the governmental systems are saturated with corrupt cockroaches. And thanks to a certain Mr. Raju from Andhra Pradesh, we have come to “realize” that the corporate world isn't all that clean either.
But look around you, we are progressing; and not by a small margin but by leaps and bounds. This country of so many contradictions of so many different kinds of diversities is not only managing to stick together as a coherent entity, we are actually working together. To paraphrase a dialog from a movie called “Namastey London” or something to that effect “India is the only country in the world where a Catholic lady stepped aside to let a Sikh gentleman take the oath of office of Prime Minister from a Muslim President in a Hindu majority nation.” Come to think of it, which country can boast of such acceptance of diversity?
The USA immediately comes to mind, but the point to be noted here and the question to be asked is this, would Mr. Barack Hussain Obama have been elected to the office of the President of the USA if he had not converted to Christianity? Would the people of the USA have elected a Muslim president?
Yes we have had pogroms in our country, the most recent being the Gujarat carnage, orchestrated by Narendra Modi, in which a tragic number of Muslims were killed, some of them brutally, I will spare you the details which are a mere Google search away. The point to be noted here is that the carnage, though tragic, remained confined to the state of Gujarat (certain parts of Gujarat if memory serves me right). It was not like the whole nation of India got divided among communal lines and erupted into civil strife.
Wherever there are differences, there are bound to be conflicts, they may be communal in nature or ideological or something else. The point is, that so many years after independence, we are still together as one single nation, even though we have been through events that should have torn this country apart.
Lets change the subject. Communal togetherness is not the only feather in our cap. We have several others. The space program for one is a huge asset. Sure, we haven't sent anyone to the moon or anything to Mars (yet), but there is one thing we can boast of that no other country or conglomerate can boast of. Our maiden voyage to the moon, the first time we ever tried sending anything that far away from terra firma, succeeded.
No country other than India, no space agency other than ISRO (Indian Space Research Organization) can boast of succeeding at their first ever moon mission. How is that for a feather in our cap?
Let us talk about the military. It is no secret that we are not the most powerful nation on the planet. But ours is one of the largest armies. And if memory serves me right, ours is one of the most successful armies. The only time one army enforced a complete and unconditional surrender on another army was in the war of 1971 when the army of Pakistan (under Gen. Niazi) surrendered to the Indian National Army (under Gen. Sam Manekshaw) in Bangladesh (East Pakistan back then).
Anti terror and anti insurgent forces around the world are seeking the expertise of the corresponding commands of the Indian National Army in terms of training. Thanks to Pakistan our defense forces have become experts in matters of combating terrorism. Many would hold the 26-11 Mumbai attacks to mean the contrary, but on close examination reveal that the cause of the carnage was negligence on part of the civilian authorities as they disregarded the Intelligence reports provided by the RAW and IB (our intelligence agencies).
I am not denying the fact that its not all hunky dory in India, but there is an awful lot of good that is going on as well. Instead of concentrating on the bad news, working up a temper and coming down with blood pressure and other tension related disorders, we should concentrate on the good news. We should take pride in whatever successes our country can boast of, and use that pride to fuel our progress, while keeping the bad news in mind so that we do not repeat our own mistakes.
I take pride in being an Indian, and I know most (if not all) of you do, ergo its time to show it by working for the betterment of our country, after all, the government is not solely responsible for national development, we all are, whether we like it or not, so why not start liking it?
I am not going to watch Slumdog Millionaire because I do not want the image of gargantuan garbage dumps and back alley slums thrust in my face. Yes they are a reality and I will do my part in bettering that aspect of India. But I do not want to have the bleakness and precariousness of that society thrust into my face.
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