Take ‘Indian culture’ for instance. We often have a bunch of hooligans with body odour issues telling us what it stands for. They bellow the loudest and tell an entire nation how it’s supposed to live. Any poor unwitting bloke going out for a drink with his lady friend is fair game for these foul-smelling zealots. He shall invariably have his shirt torn and bones broken, to reveal what his lady friend might have to endure would be inappropriate in such a publication. You would be justified in asking, “Why all this hoopla, men?” ‘Tis but in the name of that holier than holiest, humongous, monolithic edifice that ‘Indian Culture’ seems to have turned into.
Try not to speak of the antics of Khajurao or the mind numbing contortions of the Kamasutra, mention not the carnage of infanticide or the culinary habits (which often involved red meat) of the Aryans to these bigots. It would be sagacious to simply keep quiet and be punched in the gut or be molested or both.
Numero Deux, the Youth. Now isn’t that an enormous word? Evocative of images of wrinkle free faces shining with unbridled enthusiasm and overflowing with cock-eyed optimism; strapping lads, clad smartly, walking purposefully, with one eye on the money and one eye on the girl. This appears to be the only image slapped across our T.V screens again and again by the mainstream media. We set about defining what the Youth wants à la upward mobility and mobile phones, more films set in New York than in Bombay, shorter clothes and bigger muscles, IT jobs and vegetarian capriccios. This tepid, one-dimensional understanding of around 500 million Indians from mind bogglingly diverse backgrounds and social predicaments is at best daft.
Why then must we fall into the folly of Big Words? To facilitate Market Research surveys? To render impotent the already insipid mumblings of sociologists about Indian pluralism? To dissemble our ignorance?
Search me, I dun no.
Nachiket Joshi
