How do we begin to ask the right questions about India?
Even for me as an Indian, to hazard a sentence that tries to sum up India is something I do with reluctance.
I cannot fairly define the "India I know" because there is nothing I can compare it with - so on what basis would I be defining it?
My classmates looked at me with curious troubled eyes when we were talking about the abuses and killings of women WRT dowry today, and I couldn't reassure them that it is something that I am completely safe from without sounding like I'm getting ahead of myself. My parents are pretty liberal, except when they're not. I've never been stalked or followed, except for that one time.
Nothing is true about safety in India; everything is a matter of a labyrinthine chance. To say I've never been at risk would be silly, but to say that I have is to blame my parents or teachers or watchmen or someone else perfectly good-willed for not doing their job of protecting me. And they're not to blame.
Perhaps one thing that perhaps will always work for me as an Indian is keeping each person's best interests at heart and to make sure to strike a personal connection with them. I've noticed that nobody is likely to hurt you if they truly consider you their friend. Trust is a deeper currency, and being able to rely on each other is all people seek in this otherwise structureless chockablock chaos that is our "system". People are the only system here.
Well, even if that's not true (in the spirit that every definition's of opposite is also true, as Tharoor said), we learn to live with the risks, laugh at the dangers, make sardonic comments on the rape statistics or the female ratio, and we (as women) get by.
Since there is no other life we have known, there is no reason to feel sorry for oneself.
OH look - I've done exactly what I set out not to do. I've tried to sum up India.
No comments:
Post a Comment