Read these beautiful lines in an essay by V.S. Naipaul : India as an ache, for which one has a great tenderness, but from which at length one always wishes to separate oneself.
He talks about his impressions upon his visiting the country for the first time - the constant whirl of things happening, the desire to place people in an understandable frame of reference because India is vast and complex. Naipaul also notices that people want to plunder and leave as far as state of mind goes - not stay from love, loyalty or something else.
How strange to find, in free India, this attitude of the conqueror, this attitude of plundering—a frenzied attitude, as though the opportunity might at any moment be withdrawn—in those very people to whom the developing society has given so many opportunities. This attitude of plundering is that of the immigrant colonial society.
What Naipaul observed back then must have been the harbinger of what is to come. Since that time to the present day, there is the desire to make the most of what opportunity exists right now because circumstances can change - there is no faith in the future but there is abundant pessimism. My friend A recently said that nothing can possibly change for India by way of election because the defeated party's workforce will simply re-badge themselves - it is the same cast of characters doing what they have forever done in the name of the ruling party (whatever that happens to be). So there is really no point to elections or democracy in the end. Needless to say, A has never voted in her entire life and does not intend to start now. I never saw adults go out to vote when I was a kid growing up in India. Their reasons were variants of A's. Naipaul observed very astutely that Indians love to slip into the mysterious and abstract from actionable and concrete:
..there always came a moment when Indians, administrator, journalist, poet, holy man, slipped away like eels into muddy abstraction. They abandoned intellect, observation, reason; and became “mysterious.” It is in that very area that separates India from comprehension that the Indian deficiency lies. To see mysteriousness is to excuse the intellectual failure or to ignore it. It is to fall into the Indian trap, to assume that the poverty of the Indian land must also extend to the Indian mind.
Of why India is fragmented- true of the time when Naipaul wrote the essay and to this day, he says:
.. India is fragmented; it is part of her dependence. This is not the fragmentation of region, religion or caste. It is the fragmentation of a country held together by no intellectual current, no developing inner life of its own. It is the fragmentation of a country without even an idea of a graded but linked society.
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