Published in the Hindu Businessline:
http://www.thehindubusinessline.com/2006/01/05/stories/2006010501971000.htm
The Little Blue Book
Raghuvir Mukherji
RECENTLY, on a trip to London, I overheard a Bengali colleague saying he had to go to India House to get his son's visa for India. Intrigued, I asked my friend what nationality his son carried. "Australian," he replied, without batting an eyelid. "How come?" I asked, since I knew he had spent a major part of his childhood in Delhi, and had presumed he was an Indian citizen, as also his three-year-old son.
"Well, I am an Australian citizen, so junior is Aussie too," he said with a shrug, adding: "I had gone to Australia to do my MBA," he replied, "and after that I started to work in Australia, and then I got the opportunity to take citizenship, so I just took it." "Anyway," he explained further, "What difference does it make? It is just a travel document. An Australian passport makes it easier to gain access to European countries and the US. At heart, I remain an Indian... I support India on the cricket field," he added, a bit defensively.
Travel document? I always thought the ticket is the travel document. A passport is a proof of identity. A document certifying who you are, and where you belong. As one writer had put it, "a nation is a covenant between a land and its people." When you let go of your passport, whether for pecuniary gain or ease of travel, you break that covenant.
This may sound politically incorrect in the age of globalisation, when the government is bending over backwards to attract investments and money from the Indian Diaspora.
And why is the country now offering these people a sort of secondary identity for them to escape the rules that govern foreigners in India, when, for all practical purposes, they are foreign citizens who have sworn allegiance to another nation?
India is, barring the occasional communal conflict, an example of a working multi-cultural, multi-religious and multi-lingual society. An Indian identity cannot be defined by one racial type, one language or one religion. So what remains is that tiny blue book, with the `Republic of India' printed in clumsy gold lettering on top and our names in it.
A vast majority of Indians do not have that little book. But they proudly share that identity and carry the burden of all the trials, tribulations and hopes that come with it. Those of us who do have it should cherish it, because it binds us to this identity and represents our common hopes and dreams for a better future, for a better India, free of poverty, ignorance, corruption and communalism.
Sunday, June 1, 2008
Balance
My wife and I have often discussed the 'troubles' that the working population faces in taking the old and the young with us in our journey through life. In an increasingly individualistic society, it is becoming too much for some of us to take care of aging parents or have children. The only things that matter are self-aggrandizement and material prosperity.
There is no doubt that material prosperity is rewarding, and fulfilling. I just bought myself a new set of clothes, a new wallet and a new pair of glasses. I was quite pleased with my new purchases. But the question is, how long will they last, before they become old; before I want to buy something else to make me feel good. There is also no doubt that the pursuit of prosperity is a great incentive to better things. The relentless pursuit of prosperity has given the west the lifestyles that people are enjoying there, even as many of the cradles of civilization: Africa, Mesopotamia (Iran and Iraq) and India languish in poverty, and more often than not, are plagued by poor government delivery mechanisms. Individualism has also given people a sense of liberty, a greater amount of choice and the responsibility to take charge of their lives. In a society where everyone is free to make their choices, and treated equally before the law, each person has a greater opportunity to fulfil his / her full potential and rise up the social strata.
But as Mark Tully, the legendary BBC correspondent for India points out in his thought-provoking book India’s Unending Journey, a soul-less meritocracy creates a Darwinian society where the ‘losers’ are treated with contempt and made to feel inferior. He refers to his own school, where a great premium was placed on academic excellence; I see this phenomenon playing out in most modern corporations, and I find it very inhuman. Can we really call ourselves civilized if we go back to ‘Survival of the fittest’ ? By no means am I saying that rewarding on the basis of merit is bad; anything else is definitely worse. Neither am I advocating a socialistic society---we’ve tried implementing that, and we know it doesn’t work. So the question is what is the best way forward ? I think individual choice is paramount. The choice to be what I would like to be, and to a large extent, to say what I would like to say, as long as I don’t hurt others or denigrate or ridicule them. But so is training to ensure that at least the majority of us use this choice responsibly. To give an example, a friend recently told me that he preferred to use a hand-dryer and not paper tissue since it was more eco-friendly. To wipe a wet face, I would still prefer to use paper tissue (hot air can’t be too comfortable for the eyes, and moreover, will entail some expert gymnastic manoeuvres with the hand dryer), but at least to dry my hands, I have started to use the dryer. So we need the paper, but let us use it responsibly. Again to go back to Tully’s book, the trick is to find the right balance. The balance between a meritocratic market-driven economy on the one hand and looking after those whom the market ignores (i.e. people who cannot avail those choices because of their limited abilities or resources). In most cases, the state should chip in; but it cannot only be the responsibility of the state. Each of us, in our daily lives, have to strive to maintain this balance, because without it, we will become dehumanised. In a meeting that I had attended, His Holiness the Dalai Lama said that contrary to popular perception, he did not consider superior intelligence to be man’s defining characteristic; it was just an additional gift. What made us human was compassion. Animals do show compassion at times, but rarely. We have been blessed with a much bigger sensibility and the ability to show compassion. Though he defined it as how we treat strangers, I say even that isn’t necessary – how we treat our own, the weak in our own family – our aged parents and our children, can define our compassion. And this is where I will go back to the point about balance: whereas I cannot advocate returning to repressive, Orwellian or feudalistic social systems where decisions affecting our lives are taken by a Samaaj (समाज) or Panchayat or ‘wise men of the village’ (as is still the case in most of rural India), I do advocate a balance between the individualism of Western societies and the cohesiveness and social obligations of Oriental societies. This should be voluntary and not mandatory, like the use of paper towels in the toilets. We need to take care of our parents, physically, economically and emotionally; likewise our children, especially in countries like India, where social security systems are poor or non-existent. But even in Western societies, where better social security systems exist, I feel this is an area which would gain from the adoption of ‘best practices’ from the East. Old people are often opiniated and inflexible. But we are where we are today, because they chose to bring us up. Many of our values are imbibed from them. How can we forsake them when they are old and helpless ? And they pass on their greatest inheritance - the wealth of their experience, the lessons that they have learnt in life’s hard classrooms, to those that need them the most: their grandchildren, and our children, providing a line of tradition and thought that we may not have the time to pass on, or the knowledge, given the mad rush to keep body and soul together.
There is no doubt that material prosperity is rewarding, and fulfilling. I just bought myself a new set of clothes, a new wallet and a new pair of glasses. I was quite pleased with my new purchases. But the question is, how long will they last, before they become old; before I want to buy something else to make me feel good. There is also no doubt that the pursuit of prosperity is a great incentive to better things. The relentless pursuit of prosperity has given the west the lifestyles that people are enjoying there, even as many of the cradles of civilization: Africa, Mesopotamia (Iran and Iraq) and India languish in poverty, and more often than not, are plagued by poor government delivery mechanisms. Individualism has also given people a sense of liberty, a greater amount of choice and the responsibility to take charge of their lives. In a society where everyone is free to make their choices, and treated equally before the law, each person has a greater opportunity to fulfil his / her full potential and rise up the social strata.
But as Mark Tully, the legendary BBC correspondent for India points out in his thought-provoking book India’s Unending Journey, a soul-less meritocracy creates a Darwinian society where the ‘losers’ are treated with contempt and made to feel inferior. He refers to his own school, where a great premium was placed on academic excellence; I see this phenomenon playing out in most modern corporations, and I find it very inhuman. Can we really call ourselves civilized if we go back to ‘Survival of the fittest’ ? By no means am I saying that rewarding on the basis of merit is bad; anything else is definitely worse. Neither am I advocating a socialistic society---we’ve tried implementing that, and we know it doesn’t work. So the question is what is the best way forward ? I think individual choice is paramount. The choice to be what I would like to be, and to a large extent, to say what I would like to say, as long as I don’t hurt others or denigrate or ridicule them. But so is training to ensure that at least the majority of us use this choice responsibly. To give an example, a friend recently told me that he preferred to use a hand-dryer and not paper tissue since it was more eco-friendly. To wipe a wet face, I would still prefer to use paper tissue (hot air can’t be too comfortable for the eyes, and moreover, will entail some expert gymnastic manoeuvres with the hand dryer), but at least to dry my hands, I have started to use the dryer. So we need the paper, but let us use it responsibly. Again to go back to Tully’s book, the trick is to find the right balance. The balance between a meritocratic market-driven economy on the one hand and looking after those whom the market ignores (i.e. people who cannot avail those choices because of their limited abilities or resources). In most cases, the state should chip in; but it cannot only be the responsibility of the state. Each of us, in our daily lives, have to strive to maintain this balance, because without it, we will become dehumanised. In a meeting that I had attended, His Holiness the Dalai Lama said that contrary to popular perception, he did not consider superior intelligence to be man’s defining characteristic; it was just an additional gift. What made us human was compassion. Animals do show compassion at times, but rarely. We have been blessed with a much bigger sensibility and the ability to show compassion. Though he defined it as how we treat strangers, I say even that isn’t necessary – how we treat our own, the weak in our own family – our aged parents and our children, can define our compassion. And this is where I will go back to the point about balance: whereas I cannot advocate returning to repressive, Orwellian or feudalistic social systems where decisions affecting our lives are taken by a Samaaj (समाज) or Panchayat or ‘wise men of the village’ (as is still the case in most of rural India), I do advocate a balance between the individualism of Western societies and the cohesiveness and social obligations of Oriental societies. This should be voluntary and not mandatory, like the use of paper towels in the toilets. We need to take care of our parents, physically, economically and emotionally; likewise our children, especially in countries like India, where social security systems are poor or non-existent. But even in Western societies, where better social security systems exist, I feel this is an area which would gain from the adoption of ‘best practices’ from the East. Old people are often opiniated and inflexible. But we are where we are today, because they chose to bring us up. Many of our values are imbibed from them. How can we forsake them when they are old and helpless ? And they pass on their greatest inheritance - the wealth of their experience, the lessons that they have learnt in life’s hard classrooms, to those that need them the most: their grandchildren, and our children, providing a line of tradition and thought that we may not have the time to pass on, or the knowledge, given the mad rush to keep body and soul together.
Subscribe to:
Posts (Atom)