“Our great Indian culture”

We hear or read very often.  People saying, “our great Indian culture”,  “our great  Indian culture is getting spoilt by western influence”, “there is nothing like our great Indian culture”, “let’s preserve our great Indian culture” and so forth.   But not every Indian says that.  A little examination of the profiles of those who do would reveal that they all have certain shared features; they all belong to the set of chauvinist/sexist Indian men.  (hereafter called Set C).  I do not mean all Indian men, however.  There definitely exists a set of Indian men that are progressive. A set that is slowly expanding, a set that scoffs with as much contempt as I and women of my ilk do, at the mention of “our great Indian culture”.

I am not against any people of the world feeling proud of their culture.  My trouble is not with calling Indian culture great.  It is calling it great for reasons that Set C do.

Our Set C think Indian culture is great, because in their household:

• They can enjoy unrestricted freedom that women do not.
• They can harass women and get away with it.
• The women at home slog in the kitchen to cook food for them and also get their laundry done.
• Women wait on them, serve them food, pick their plates.
• Women treat them like they are God.
• There is a male head in the family who is nothing short of a dictator.  He wears a large pagdi.  Everyone in the family has to touch his feet every morning and pander to him and his ego all day.  He knows what is best for everyone (read what is best for him), he unilaterally makes decisions on everyone’s behalf. 

Recall the Mangalore pub incident three years back, where members of Hindu right wing outfit Ram Sene beat up two girls for visiting a pub.  In the outrage that followed, there were discussions all over the internet.  I remember a comment from a doctor posting from Delhi that he hates pub going or drinking women and they are so different from the women in his house who follow “dharma”.  Let’s decipher what he means by “dharma”.  The “dharma” he is referring to  obviously means women wear only traditional clothes, are ever subservient to men, do not open their mouth unless it’s for eating, do not eat before the men do, women cook, clean, wash, baby sit and  watch Ekta Kapoor TV serials for training and upgrading their “dharma” related skills.

Obviously, our Delhi doctor uncle feels threatened by modern women.  We can understand why he hates them.  A women speaking, giving her opinion, wearing a western dress, going to a party or enjoying a drink is too much for his ego to handle.  The modern women may not follow “dharma”, and if his wife were modern, he’d have to share washing, cooking and cleaning.  Such cowardice? After all, is this what these men are afraid of?  Holey moley! Many men posted similar comments, but I picked on the doctor, as my memory also seems to have done.  Probably I was expecting something better than that from an educated doctor. 

I do not mean there aren’t chauvinists in other cultures. Nor am I a loony leftist whose full time job is to whine and complain about how bad everything about India is.  In this post I’m just trying to understand what people mean when they say “our great Indian culture”, because while they just say that, they stop short of explaining why they think it is great.

We can understand why our Set C thinks their great Indian culture is getting corrupted by western influence.  The doctor’s example says it all. 

Another observation: Set C has a deep sense of contempt for western clothes.  In a visit to Tirupati recently, I noticed at the entry into darshan queue that some young men and women who were in shorts or capris were asked to go back and change into full length clothes or buy dhotis being sold near the entry, and wrap it over their shorts.  What a way to sell their merchandise!  A tie up between the cloth merchant and the temple staff in the name of Indian culture/dress code. There were a lot of topless men in the queue wearing just a dhoti. Also a lot of those men had folded their dhotis up knee length, in effect showing more skin than those boys or girls wearing shorts. “Our great Indian culture”, indeed.

In another temple downhill next morning, while we sitting in the premises and waiting for it to open, a chief pontiff was passing by.  A women staffer of the temple alerted everyone and asked them to give him a standing ovation.  She herself bowed to him with almost a 90 degree bend.  “Our great Indian culture”, indeed.  I did NOT stand up.  I also looked at the pontiff straight into his eyes with an expression of deep contempt on my face. What are his achievements?  What did he contribute to the society?    We are expected to treat him like he’s super-important just because he learnt by rote certain scriptures although he has no clue what they mean. 

If that were a hundred or two hundred years back, the topless pontiff would have got me killed.  I would happily  give a standing ovation to the municipality workers who broom the streets everyday and give great service to society.

I’ve had umpteen experiences with purohits in temples.  I seem to get into a row with one almost each time I visit a temple. Bad experiences for them, fun for me, I guess.  We can’t pass off beautiful opportunities to cut immature/arrogant purohits to size.

Aw!  Second post in two days playing up the word “great”.   Not a coincidence, they were intended.

Statue. Over.

                                                         

The word ‘great’ and its derivatives usually apply in positive contexts: great people, great work, great art, great holiday, great fun.

We know that great people walked the earth at different points of time and helped it take shape.   Last year or so, there was a question in my boy’s practice SAT he had broken his head over and had asked me help. Something along the lines of “can the actions of average people have an effect on the course of history?”   If that were a week back (March, 10), I’d have redirected him to the newspapers that carried front page reports and pictures of the ‘million march’ in Hyderabad by average people.  Average college kids, motivated into greatness…greatness with a connotation we are not used to. Greatness at it’s destructive best.

A word of caution:  ‘Million march’ by no means indicates that a million took part in it as its organizers would have us believe.  Or may be they follow a different numeral system in which they refer to a few hundreds as ‘a million’.  A few hundreds at best, by the usual numeral system, participated in it.  A few hundred self styled torchbearers of a cause that millions (millions in the usual numeral system) do not support.  The cause of a separate Telangana state. A euphemism for “the cause of unemployed politicians and their vested political and business interests.”

The ‘million’ average common people marked an event in history. Motivated into a greatness of destruction, they went vandalizing humble tributes to some of the greatest contributors to Telugu history and literature. The statues of great Telugu writers and great Telugu kings of the past aesthetically erected on Tank Bund on the Husseinsagar Lake. Average people trying to mark an event in history. Can they effect the course of history?  No, this does not answer that SAT question completely.

This act of vandalism that shocked and outraged Hyderabadis, brings back pictures of the dynamited/C4-ed Buddha figures of Bamiyan that the world was outraged at. However, the same world celebrated the destruction of Lenin’s or Saddam’s statues.  I remember an aunt who had once inverted a small metal statuette of Lenin, her husband had showcased in their living room, to pound some garlic on the kitchen counter with the rounded head of the statuette.  We found it hard to stop laughing. She was cooking a spicy curry and there was power cut in the middle of it, so she could not use the electric mixer/grinder.

When I was a child, we used to play a silly game in school called ‘Statue’. When you say “Statue!”  to someone, this person should stay still in whatever position s/he is when you said that and continue to be so till you say “Over!”  Now I wish we’d played this game with those when they were going to destroy those statues. A drive along Tank Bund will never be the same again. The statues are over.

There were agitations and bandhs in the run up to this million march.  On one such day, my car ran out of fuel, and the agitators forced all  fuel stations to shut down. Autorickshaws had a field day. I paid Rs. 500 to get to work, and Rs. 400 to get back home from work.  Ridiculous.

The Hussainsagar lake is jinxed for statues?  Earlier, in 1990 Buddha statue fell in the lake by accident.  There is a rock called Gibraltar rock in the middle of the 400 year old Hussain Sagar Lake in Hyderabad.  Many years back, the Chief Minister at that time, wanted to have a statue of Buddha on the rock.  The multi-million project and its modalities: the when, why, how, who etc were greatly disputed by the politicians. Finally decisions were taken, executed and after two years, in 1990, the much awaited and much-hyped, the world’s tallest monolith of Buddha (in white granite, 18meters, 350 tons) was ready for installation. One morning, it was to be taken to the rock in a boat.  Thousands of people gathered around the lake to watch the process.  The whole of Hyderabad was eagerly waiting for it to happen. The lake is quite a small one, and it is barely a five minute boat-journey to the rock. But during that short journey, the boat somehow tilted and Buddha plunged into the lake!!!
 
Eleven people on the boat fell along with the statue, and one of them drowned.  Buddha lay stoically under water for a year or more, while the politicians again fought over who should take him out and how etc. Apparently, we didn’t have the technology and a Japanese company got the privilege. (I think they attached deflated floats to it and then inflated them, causing it to float.) The statue was out, but not before it was badly damaged.  It took several months to touch it up.  In 1992 they carried it to the rock again, and once again people gathered around the lake and watched with nail-biting tension. No. They didn’t drop it this time. So after costing the government a few more millions, the troubles of Buddha were finally over and he was successfully installed where he stands tall today. If I remember, they had called the Dalai Lama for inaugurating it, on Buddha Purnima day in May.

As I’m previewing this article, I suspect my whining about the woes of statues in Hyderabad may not hold much water in the backdrop of what is going on in Japan, even though the statues themselves met a watery grave.  Nevertheless I say “over” to this post on statues and  hit ‘Publish Post’