A Civilization on Thin Ice
Growing up on the edge of freedom
When I was a schoolkid, the most boring and overused phrase we could hear in classrooms, assemblies and school-day ceremonies was “Unity in Diversity”. Every time a speaker stepped up to the podium, we were sure to hear this phrase at least once, followed by a long list of lovely colorful things you could only find in India. When I was in middle school, I even remember placing bets on the number of times we would hear the phrase in a given event. It was always something that I perceived to be said half-heartedly and out of cultural compulsion. But now, I would give anything to hear it again in an Indian school.
The India I grew up in is not one of ancient history and yet, it was nothing like the country that I now see. A foreign eye might not be able to tell the two apart, but for someone that remembers what it was like to grow up there in the early 2000s, there exists a world of difference.
There was a characteristic innocence in the culture. Things might suck right now, but it’s all going to be okay someday. Despite the presence of poverty and misery, we confronted it directly, seeing it as a duty rather than something to shun. There was also a child-like happiness in simple materialism. I remember the first few iPhones and iPads coming out. Someone in the extended family would always get their hands on one first and wait for a wedding or birthday party to show it off. We would all cluster around the uncle with the new iPhone and wait for our turn to play Angry Birds. These two things were magically possible at the same time. We were both a poor and messy country, and a liberal democracy. The rest of the world looked at us with suspicion and predicted our fall into the pits of sectarianism at every turn. It took them a while, but they were vindicated.
When I look back and try to think about what it was that kept us from going astray for such a long time, I am reminded of the boring old mantra: “Unity in Diversity”. It was this simple phrase and the repetitive rhetoric surrounding it that served as a thin layer of ice between us and the dark depths of sectarianism.
The India of today is a chest-thumping giant that boasts of glory and an ambition to be a global superpower. But, when you look at what it is that India is now so proud of, you find that Indians have been told that it is possible to be proud just for the heck of it. You don’t have to look your fellow countrymen in the eye as they struggle to stay afloat, why focus on the negatives? Instead, look at pictures of big buildings and say, “India has now arrived.” The schoolkids of today’s India are taught that they live in the golden age of modernity while their country continues to be perhaps the most deeply classist society in the world. Take a walk in the streets of any major Indian city and you can tell with crystal clarity, the people who live in a democracy from those that live in a soviet nightmare. People inhabit parallel universes even as their shoulders rub against each other on the sidewalks (or the lack thereof). For a wealthy and educated family, the slum beside their favorite mall is just a sight to avoid. For the family that lives in the slum, the mall is an unthinkable aspiration. The former is now told that they no longer have to fear the ugly sights as the bulldozers clear them up.
What is chilling about all of this is that it does not look or feel like an anomaly or just a bad phase that will soon be reversed. It feels like equilibrium. It seems almost like this is the natural state of our society.
A recent incident comes to mind that epitomizes this notion. I used to live in a gated community in the middle of the city. The neighborhood was a calm and peaceful haven amidst the chaos and unruly traffic. One night, a motorcyclist decided to take a shortcut through the neighborhood to get to the other side of town. It was dark and quiet, but it also happened to be the time of evening that senior residents of the neighborhood stepped out for an evening stroll. This motorcyclist was in such a damn hurry to get to wherever he was going that he rammed into an old man who was out for a walk, killing him on the spot.
However, this is not the worst part of the story, traffic accidents have been known to happen everywhere, of course. The day after the accident, residents of the neighborhood spent all afternoon standing on the streets, holding placards that asked the traffic to slow down in the neighborhood since it was a residential area. These were hurt families on the road, and you would expect a bare minimum of decency from the traffic. But what they got in return for their requests was cruel and cold dismissal. Cars honked at them mercilessly and motorcyclists swerved around them, swearing at them to get out of the way. If you asked someone from any Indian city what they thought of the incident, they would not point at the rudeness of the drivers and the motorcyclists, but rather at the annoying naivete of the residents. You can’t disturb the traffic because one old man died, shit happens. This really would not have been the response of a majority of the Indian public when I was a kid. It would’ve been one of deep shame, guilt and regret. But today’s India thinks that shame is a sign of weakness. It would rather play the tough guy and honk at grieving families.
If there’s any silver lining to all of this, it’s this: I have realized how precious liberal values are and how precarious civilization really is. We take modern life for granted, but there is a very thin layer of benevolence that protects us from all that we have run away from as a species; things that we tend to think we’ve left behind, like naked selfishness, apathy and tribalism. In India, we had a layer of cosmopolitan elitism that influenced the culture in many ways. It was in our politics, our literature and cinema. In every realm of Indian life, there was signaling of tolerance and pluralism. There was always a latent resentment lurking in the background, but we had managed to keep it at bay. Slowly, but surely, those forces took the reins and now, here we are in the same pit that every third world country seems to inevitably fall into. We were bored of all the virtue-signaling and the fundamentalist forces took advantage of that. But we must realize that we could only be bored because we had forgotten what it was like to not have any virtues to live up to in the first place.
I hope this rant of mine serves as a cautionary tale to people living in more fortunate societies in the West. The things that make life better for you did not have to be there. They were hard won and need to be preserved with utmost resolve. Things can get a lot uglier if you take the victories of your ancestors for granted. The West is the last bastion of democracy, and it needs defenders now, more than ever.