Confessions of Youth on 2002

A lot has been said about Indian urban Youth, their priorities, the things that influence them, the mediums that appeal to them, their identity or lack of it and so on. Owing to the conditioning they are subjected to and the things that influence them since birth, not many Youth today are expected to have an in-depth understanding of socio-political issues from diverse perspectives. However, if one were to analyse the various perspectives of Gujarati Youth (and perhaps even their elders) on the infamous happenings of 2002, a majority of views are by and large similar and can easily be classified into sections, something I do not like to do otherwise.

· “2002? What!”: A few days ago, a documentary was being shot on the 10 years that have passed since 2002. A student of a prominent college was asked: “What happened in 2002?”, his reply – “India defeated England and Ganguly took off his shirt”. Quite a number of Gujarati Youth are unaware about the term ‘2002’ and any of what happened that year, the decades of history prior to it and the events that followed. In different interactions with them, I also discovered that the fact that a few lakh people were forcibly displaced from their homes and had to live in inhuman conditions in relief camps is absolutely unknown to so many Youth in the ‘New City’.

· “Ya I know about 2002 but it happened so long ago. Everything is fine now”: In a friendly debate that I was once having with an old friend of mine, he went to the extent of saying – “If by killing people, development happens, then I am fine with it”. Very often in capitalistic times, priorities are dictated by the pursuit of money, errr.…..”happiness”. Call it either indifference or misguided priorities, to a major section of Youth, lives today are governed by pay packages, mark sheets and of course the customary opposite sex obsession. To such a branch of thought, a mall or a flyover as a display of wealth or progress would be reason enough to “move on”. “Reconciliation” or “moving on” are human choices and anyone is free to make their own choice and stick to it. But in the case of 2002, they should apply only if the people who were affected by the violence make these choices.

· “Events like 2002 were long due and actions have consequences”: Gujarat is known to have a communal history and 2002 was not the first and possibly not the last visible climax of a conditioned mindset of hate. There is a section of Youth who have inherited the hate and they exist on both sides. Looking at 2002 as a “reaction to Godhra” or references to manipulated facts about “religious conversions”, “cow slaughter” and so on are very common to a Gujarati ear.

· “2002 should not be repeated and there is no peace without justice”: There is always a small group of people who either work in NGOs, law, police, judiciary and otherwise and hold a humanist orientation. Yes, some of these unpardonably look at events such as 2002 as opportunities for glory and business. But there is no doubt that the rest have been unfailingly fighting for justice and human rights in the last 10 years and will continue to do so even in the future. Youth belonging to this branch of thought are remarkably branded by names such as “pseudo-secularist”, “traitor” and so on an alarmingly high number of times.

Edward R. Murrow once said “No one can terrorise a whole nation, unless we are all his accomplices”. Blaming one man or one political party for what happened in Gujarat in 2002 would be equivalent to targeting one of the symptoms and conveniently excusing ourselves from the blame. No amount of propaganda can result in such a brutal outcome if the propaganda was not on the lines of what we as a population already felt or perhaps wanted. Statements such as “2002 Gujarat happened because of 2002 Godhra” are like saying “I will go and slap a girl today because another girl had slapped me yesterday”. Violence is unacceptable irrespective of what religion or group of people or nation is affected and such justifications by us only imply the truth of what we conceal within.

‘Sad-bhavna’ or not, it is a fact that property in Gujarat is still not sold or rented out to people with Muslim names. Dietary preferences, clothing, visual appearances, geographical areas and major social issues are still classified on the lines of religion. I am not willing to accept that one man or one party are solely responsible for such attitudes and events such as 2002 and as long as we do not understand this and claim responsibility and make amends, ‘2002’ will be succeeded by several such man-made tragedies.

Valen-tied Day

Contrary to popular understanding, many things in life cannot be described as either black or white, good or bad, right or wrong. Sometimes, it helps to just look at things from an external perspective and try and understand all aspects of it.

Not much is known about the concept of ‘Valentine’s Day’ apart from the date on which it is supposed to be celebrated and the expectations of giving gifts or proposing to the person you love. Technically, Valentine’s Day was observed to honour one or more early Christian martyrs named Saint Valentine, evidences of which can be traced back to as early as 496 AD. It is only after the 15^th Century that the occasion started becoming associated with love, something that did not necessarily exist in its original conception.

There is also no doubt about the fact that increasingly, an entire industry revolves around Valentine’s Day, much like an Uttarayan or Diwali. According to estimates, approximately 15 crore Valentine's Day cards are exchanged globally each year, making Valentine's Day the second most popular card-sending holiday after Christmas. India started seeing the rise of Valentine’s Day in 1992, with special TV and radio programs, and even ‘love letter competitions’. The economic liberalization also helped the Valentine card industry. In fact, when you come to think of it, since it is not a part of our cultural or social inheritance, who would have known about the existence of this concept had the media and the shops and restaurants around us not put up boards about it! Leftists and liberal critics have also said that this celebration aids in the creation of a pseudo-westernized middle class and promotes income inequality.

There has also been a lot of opposition to the concept from the usual suspects. Stories about Hindu and Islamic fundamentalists organizing protests, sometimes violent ones, have been doing the rounds for years now. The ‘Pink Chaddi’ campaign organized in 2009 as an answer to one such protest is still fresh in our minds. The reasons claimed by these protesters range from “the concept being alien to Indian culture”, “displays of love being against conventional Indian values”, “globalization destroying Indian history” and so on.

It is safe to assume that Valentine’s Day is known and practiced mainly amongst urban privileged Youth as compared to being a luxury for their faceless, distant counterparts slogging in villages or hunting for livelihood in cities. If we look at Valentine’s Day from the practicing Youth’s perspective, there are two distinct approaches. There are the ones who exchange gifts and cards, propose to the person they love, go out on dates, write poetries and shayaris (most of which are discreetly lifted through Google), visit couples-only places, wear red, consume ‘banned’ liquor and so on. The recently heard joke about “Valentine’s Day coming exactly 9 months before Children’s Day” also hints that Valentine’s Day is perhaps not looked just as a day for love but also as a day for making love. There is no doubt that the gifts made especially for this occasion certainly seem to be sweet and the thought of girls and boys celebrating love does appeal to our Yash-Raj-fantasy-love psyches.

The other branch of thought within the Youth questions the very need of having one particular day, that too defined by the world, to celebrate or express one’s feelings. The liberated lot also question whether the need to jump at particular occasions also implies a lack of happiness and interest in everyday life. Seeing everyone around them doing so or being expected to do so, such occasions also force Youth to practice it even if they may not want to. A trend of gifting a necessarily expensive gift as symbolic of a lover’s ‘status’ or measurement of the partner’s worth is also noticed at times. There is also the increasingly discussed concept of falling in love and getting into a relationship being seen as the ultimate destination while not paying any thought or not knowing how the feeling and the relationship will be sustained after a while.

Good or bad, right or wrong, from a personal perspective, as long as one is not too obsessed with loving or hating Valentine’s Day, one can treat it as just another day that some people celebrate, some people ape, some people earn out of, some people hate and most people are unaware of.

"My country strongest!"

Towards the evening of 26^th January, most Indian news sites boasted of headlines on the lines of - “India's military might showcased on Republic Day”. There were mentions of how “the 3,000 kms range Agni-IV missile, the T-72 tank, the C-130-J Super Hercules tactical aircraft” and many more were the highlights of this nationally celebrated flaunting of “strength”.

The republic day of my country India is supposed to commemorate the date on which the Constitution of India came into force replacing the Government of India Act 1935 as the governing document of India on the 26^th of January, 1950. Never have I understood why such an occasion is celebrated every year with a display of military “strength”.

At least until a few years ago, it used to be a proud routine in a lot of Indian families to sit together and watch Doordarshan on the morning of the 26^th and feel a rare sense of joint patriotism within. Even now, there are instances of parents travelling long distances with their children to witness this spectacle. What exactly are we celebrating here? What are we teaching our children? What is our definition of ‘patriotism’? How do we look at the notion of ‘strength’?

India is increasingly shaping itself into the America of South-East Asia. Cries by our media and middle classes of us turning into a “global superpower” are increasing each day. So perhaps, such a republic day celebration is what we do to flex our muscles in full view of the world. In that sense, we are positioning ourselves in a hierarchy we should ideally abhor and one that is very dangerous to the basic human right to life. Such a perception of ‘strength’ a few decades after defeating an entire colonial empire applying Mohandas Gandhi’s principles of non-violence and peace is tragic, to say the least.

Or maybe this celebration is the most we could come up with to celebrate and announce our patriotism. Maybe, at times we need to feel patriotic in ways besides the candle-light-media-covered-glamourous-marches by Indian citizens and corruption-division-manipulation by Indian rulers. One can’t deny that there is something hair-raising in a film scene where a soldier gets bulldozed with ten bullets and he screams “Bharat mata ki jay” still not letting go of the Indian flag. If we claim that a ‘terrorist’ agrees to give up his life because of religious fanaticism then what must be reason enough to convince a soldier to sacrifice his life fighting an enemy he never chose! If your answer is patriotism, I wonder why the most patriotic people in India are so poor. How many rich dudes can you count in the army? What we often fail to realize is that such propaganda is beneficial to the ruling political party in the sense that it unites the people of the nation against a different ‘enemy’, pulls all attention away from pressing issues of governance, overloads the pockets of a few defence factory owners and turns the number of dead people from a tragedy into a statistic.

Let me take up a very psychological basic aspect now. Do we buy a gun for our son apart from the customary tricycle and Frisbee? How will we react if the first person we see on the road points a gun at us? Does the sight of seeing a now customary gun planted on a security guard’s body not make us feel strange at times? Acts of murder and killings are reported as ‘crimes’ every single day in each newspaper you pick up. We collectively claim to hate Ajmal Kasab because he used a gun to kill people in Bombay. Why then do we celebrate the display of a missile or aircraft or bomb that is capable of killing several times more people than Kasab’s gun? Why are we selective in our approval of violence? This is where the concept of ‘legitimacy’ enters the frame. If we are told and made to believe that the use of violence is justified by one body towards the second but never by the second towards the first, a situation like this can lead to lakhs of human beings being butchered and the chain of hatred going on forever, several instances of which can be found in history.

It took the same Americans who once fully believed that the wars on Iraq and Afghanistan were ‘necessary’ a few lakh killings and as many revenge-seeking sufferers, to see through the projected lies and throw out the President who was the political face of that propaganda. Are we going to learn from their doings?

"Indian Youth: The Future of the Nation". Really???

A majority of the Indian populace has remained faceless, a mere statistic that intermittently reminds us of their existence somewhere in the back pages of our newspapers associated with ‘alien’ concepts such as ‘hunger’, ‘poverty’, ‘malnutrition’ and so on.

Let me try and list my observations on that section of Indians which is getting increasingly visible: The Youth - the ones who stay in cities and are privileged. Concealed somewhere beneath the external image of being ‘fashionable’ and ‘modern’ are lots of painful and sometimes scary traits that need urgent analysis.

When we hope for great things from our Youth, one fundamental assumption we make is of them holding a distinct identity of their own choosing. Yes there certainly is a bunch of brilliant, unconventional Youth changing the future but for reasons that I will come to later, most Youth today are left leaning on other people and/or things for a semblance of their ‘own’ identity. Their dependence on ‘tags’ and ‘names’ as indicators of their own worth, not knowing who they are and what they want and their belief in a hierarchy in every aspect of life are just a few indicators of this phenomenon.

I distinctly remember reading in a Helpline coloumn just before the Delhi University admissions a few years ago, an appeal by a girl who had scored about 92% in her 12^th Standard exams and was contemplating suicide as she missed the cut-off for the college of her choice by about 1%. After a heated Youth debate on the Jan Lokpal bill, another girl had once asked me: “Ok Anna Hazare’s demands seem to be unfair. So you tell us, who should we follow?” At another seminar at a private MBA institute in Ahmedabad, the first boy to answer when asked what the Jan Lokpal bill was replied: “When we go to a shop, the bill that we ask for is called the Jan Lokpal bill”. A group of about 10 students from a very prominent college in Ahmedabad were shocked when they discovered that a few lakh people were staying in refugee camps in the same city for very long after the 2002 Gujarat pogrom. At a Personality Contest at a college recently, when a girl was asked who was to blame if a girl got raped outdoors by a drunk man at 10:30 PM, she replied “the girl’s family, because they should never allow her to go out so late”. Instances of NGOs getting calls from Youth wanting to work for “a few days” in their projects because they want “a certificate for greater chances of admission to MBA colleges” are increasing with each passing day. One can find thousands of facebook profiles of girls (apparently) with one photo and a few hundred comments below by boys trying to compete with each other for getting her into bed, to put it openly. The misdirected priorities of Indian media and the Youth’s fondness for anything that is seemingly “western” don’t help much either. In such times, expecting awareness or knowledge about which candidate to vote for or understanding the role played by global economies on several aspects of one’s daily life remain luxuries that can only be fantasized about.

If we think about the people they meet, the things they do and the places they go to each day, from morning to evening, how many positive influences on Youth today can one manage to count! Who is telling them to not hate, to freely love, guiding them to an exposed and aware position in Society, facilitating the formation of their own identities and development of their strengths, sensitizing them to the many pains people around them suffer from? Maybe, ‘one in a million’.

The obsessively capitalist times we live in and the dominance of religion and other hierarchical structures deeply engrained in their psyche have been major contributors to the present state of Indian Youth. The rigidity with which Society’s version of the gender roles of masculinity and homely behaviour respectively are thrust upon them damages their behaviour even further. An education system that is governed by vested interests and in Ken Robinson’s words “mines children’s brains the way we strip-mine this Earth in search of certain marketable attributes” virtually ruins their futures. But according to me, the most important factor, one that is always shockingly under-rated, is the utter failure of families, mostly fathers in a patriarchal societal system, to understand and support their children. Several instances of domestic violence which may not necessarily be only physical, a total control over every small aspect of their lives and the absolute lack of support or motivation for most things of the Youth’s own choosing play the biggest role in destroying the psyche of our Youth.

The beautiful scene depicting the confidence and belief after the long transition of a Youth in ‘3 Idiots’ where Raju (Sharman Joshi) sits in front of the interview panel and proudly states “If I don’t get this job today, I am not worried because I know that I will do something or the other with my life” remains a distant dream for most Indian Youth today.

For a long time, we have heard and read repeated stories about how crores of Indian Youth are the future of the nation. For once, be scared, be very scared!

One in a million...

When our teachers taught us about the evolution of womankind (my equivalent of “mankind”) they narrated how we moved from the stages of savagery to tribes to the barter system to agriculture to monarchies to the industrial age to the total rule of capitalism. What they never said was that with each new step in the ladder of evolution, we were enabled a greater availability of and access to the concept of ‘choices’.

A man today can choose to devote an hour a day to facebook, an hour to eating food, two hours to television, an hour to woo his crush and five hours thinking about how to, eight hours a day to sleep, eight hours a day to his pursuit of money – thus food, shelter and so on. A man 50,000 years ago didn’t have as many choices at his disposal. I assume he didn’t even have the needed mental abilities to think about creating and using choices then. However, have we truly ever given our evolution the respect it deserves? Have we thought of evolution just as a boring academic concept or have we actually made positive use of the advancements in our generation as compared to our ancestors?

The upbringing of and the lack of initiative from a boy born today is such that his foremost ambitions are an Audi, a bungalow and a ‘hot’ wife. Their female counterparts aspire to get a rich, preferably handsome husband, shop at will and be factories for producing more kids into the same system. Is a get up-shit-bathe-eat-travel-labour-eat-labour-travel-eat-sleep life the only conclusion we deduced from our 1 crore 50 lakh years long human evolution? I assume that when popular saints and even religious books spoke of “pursuing the truth” or attaining “moksha”, this was certainly not what they intended.

The world today is a market and we are oblivious, willing commodities. In these times, everything from our education system, our notions of occupations and earning money, the media, governance, family systems and much more are all ultimately steered to a capitalistic goal. Ken Robinson once said that “our education system has mined our minds in the way that we strip-mine the earth, for a particular commodity”.

“The work that interests you is not going to earn you money”, “Marry a person of our choice or find your own shelter”, “No, you can’t study what you like. You have to do either a CA or an MBA because everyone does it”. We all idolize a Shahrukh Khan and a Sachin Tendulkar but are not allowed to and lack the courage to pursue a similar pursuit. Picasso famously said that “Every child is an artist. The problem is how to remain an artist once he grows up.” During the course of our interactions with Youth as part of the activities undertaken by our non-profit Youth organization ‘The Difference’, we realized that for most non-underprivileged urban Youth today, issues such as these occupy a much greater share of the turmoil within them rather than larger social issues such as Communalism or Climate change. Alas, a majority of them lack the necessary support and courage to take a stand and stick to it and thereby succumb to the pressures around them, letting their dreams and their hopes of a distinct identity die in the process.

Not just are these restrictions symbolic of domination, ignorance, lack of concern, lack of initiative and a fear of the unknown, they are even mathematically incorrect. Given the current situation of Gujarat, if we assume that 80% of privileged Gujarati youth have either done a CA or an MBA and being fully aware of the fact that so many things in this world need people with other skills, doesn’t that lead to a direct deduction that opportunities for the other 20% are much more and far easier than for these 80%? One does not need to be a great Amartya Senesque economist to come up with as simple a supply-demand situation as this.

All it takes is one sustained push and a life can change forever. The desire to question and form one’s own beliefs, about our own lives and others, brings a never-before-experienced sense of mental liberation. Just one trip to a ‘different’ family, place, culture, time reminds us of how chained our current mindset is and how vast the world really is. There are examples abound of humans truly being ‘human’, exercising their choices and carving out immortal identities of their own. Oh and trust me, they earned pretty well too and didn’t have particularly unattractive spouses either!

Happiness is not earned or bought or studied. It is a state of mind that simply comes by doing the things that make us happy. Will you like to spend your only life doing something that “everyone does”? Will you like to be one of the millions or the one in a million?