Changing Colors

It’s that time of the year again when the UoP is changing from dark green to light yellow, to dull brown. Summers are coming to Pune again – each time a degree hotter, each time a month earlier.

But weather is not the only thing that is changing color. Everything else is changing color around – India is changing her socioeconomic color – for good and for bad – in ways unprecedented.

While starvation deaths, droughts and failed crops plague large segments of our village population, in the cities there is a false sense of security, prosperity and general wellbeing. While our basics go from bad to worse, while our fundamentals rot, we are on the highway to fast paced growth. We are like a monster with a weak underbelly, which will burst open at the first big prick into its bottom.

We seem to be losing perspective and sense in this mad rush to westernize. Egged on by greedy capitalist forces our lifestyles are becoming increasingly money frenzied and our vision myopic.

While our villages are still dealing with female infanticide, dowry and equality of gender, women in our cities are redefining roles and boundaries. For a society which is largely unequipped to handle sexual liberation and gender equality, these uncharted waters spell trouble.

While the average Indian male struggles to find a balance between a bahu and a bar companion, his female counterpart looks for a man who is willing to give her the freedom of 21st century and yet provide for her security like in the 18th century. Our legacy of social values is directly at odds with our new found treasure of individual independence.

All generations that preceded us had role models and icons in the true sense of the word. The baton of the Indian idol from the ages of Ram, was passed on successfully. Every age had its superhero – who was the epitome of all things good – and all Indians of that age aspired to follow him or her.

With the advent of the internet, investigative journalism and sting operations, our age has been cursed with the loss of all such icons and idols. All superheroes have been stripped naked and all gods have been thrown off their high seats. The Indian of the 21st century knows that even the Indian idol is actually not a superhero, not a model of all things good, but a mere mortal, equally susceptible to failures and falsehoods like them. In the absence of nothing to follow, we are at a risk of losing our aspiration to be great.

Paradoxical and confusing this sounds – and that is the very essence of the life and times we are living in. India – and Indians – in AD 2100 are a fast changing, confused yet resolute lot. As we take the mantle of Indian ness from our elders and pas it to our young, we are hell-bent on altering the very fabric and meaning being an Indian in an unprecedented way.