Balkanization of India?

Gandhi was a remarkable man, a truly once-in-millennium human being. I say so, not because he led a successful freedom struggle against the British, but for uniting a totally disparate group of people who live in this land we call India, a land with such unparallelled diversity of cultures, customs, races, languages.

Yeah well, we have all read this in history books alright. But the above fact has never hit me as hard as it has in the recent months. Have no idea exactly why, but maybe I can blame it on a heightened level of awareness (that I hitherto did not possess) in perceiving what's going on in this country.

The concept of India as a nation cannot have happened but for Gandhi, because it must have been an audacious thought to even imagine such a diverse bunch of people could decide to be citizens of the same country! It was his legacy (and a few of his followers') that India managed to stay as one nation, although one could see cracks developing on the walls all these years.

Today, in 2008, one just has to survey the political scene in this country to see how fragmented things have become. The last decade or so, has shown that the days of the single-party rule is over and smaller and smaller groups have started wielding power. The rise of regional parties with distinctly regional interests such as the BSP, the SP, the Telugu Desam, the BJD, the PMK etc., have shown that the national identity is fast being replaced by a regional one. And the regional identities are getting smaller and smaller as has been shown by groups such as TRS in Andhra Pradesh that is demanding a separate statehood for the region.

Could this be the start of the balkanization of India? A few years earlier, I would have laughed if someone had ventured to suggest the idea that India, on the cusp of an unparalleled economic boom, faced a threat to it sovereignty. But today am not so sure. Heck, it is scary to think that this might even happen in my lifetime!

When the two of major news headlines I read today happened to be about...
a) the shameless overtures made by the UPA and the NDA to criminals and
b) the communist party's senior leader proclaiming Mayawati as a possible future PM if the UPA government falls
....I have a empty feeling in my stomach.

It is too easy to blame our politicians for the mess like so many of us do simply because we just hate being accountable. It's easier to have a bogeyman, a whipping boy, to fix the blame on and go on living our lives showing just the right amount of self-righteousness and indignation whenever it is required socially. The rot is too deep and the blame lies on all of us who have chosen to each time put self over the nation and think it is somebody else's job to govern and rule.

The wrong kind of people get to the top in politics because they are allowed to by an electorate that is either ignorant or ill-informed or selfishly-motivated and narrow-minded. When a society elects its leaders for all the wrong reasons, what hope can there be for its survival.

When there is rotting carcass for dinner, expect the vultures not butterflies.

What was that again?

I read this news item on Yahoo! this morning - "Pope calls on religions to unite against terrorism" - with a feeling, I can only describe as incredulity.

How does the head of one of the world's largest religions - one that is built around a central belief that it is superior to all other religions and whose practitioners are led to believe that "the Christian way is the only way to God" - hope to "unite" religions??

One would think that someone who goes by the title "the Holy Father", would have the wisdom to realise that you can't unite people by rhetoric alone. Till the Church (or indeed, any other similar religious body) starts practicing inclusiveness and tolerance towards other faiths, it will remain just that!

Who, or what, created the Mess?

The planet's in a mess! Pollution, environmental degradation, global warming, ozone layer depletion....Most of us know this, but right now choose to look the other way and hope someone else will figure things out and clean up the mess. Hoping, maybe, Al Gore or some other messiah will save us from impending destruction!

Like many, many people who wonder about where the human race went wrong, I too have done my share of thinking. Like in the case of the most complex problems, the answer did not come straight away, but emerged like a scenery viewed through a fog. I must say, the picture is still not fully formed, but I think I am beginning to see it.

It's funny, but modern man (primarily from the western world) mocked, scoffed (continues to do so) at ancient, tribal cultures that existed all over the world for being "backward". The empowered western world, immediately after the industrial revolution, set about conquering, destroying, annhilating other nations culturally, socially, environmentally... This is true of all that happened in Africa, Australia and the rest of Oceania, the Americas and Asia. This much is common knowledge and everyone knows this.

My attempt here, is not to recount history, but to drive at what made these men behave the way they did - completely subjugate and destroy cultures, enslave people and most importantly plunder the natural resources of this planet, wipe out entire habitats and animals leaving behind a mess that nations/governments are struggling to deal with??? What kind of thinking results in such behaviour??

I tried coming up with some answers:

a. The western man was arrogant in belief that all other cultures, beliefs and religions were inferior to his own and therefore not worthy of respect.
b. His total lack of understanding of nature and the way it works! Something that most ancient, tribal cultures possessed. (After all these very same cultures did a very good job protecting the planet for thousands of years till the white man took over in the last couple of hundred years!)

And then I read this from the white man's Holy Book:
Genesis 1.26

Then God said, “Let Us make man in Our image, according to Our likeness; and let them rule over the fish of the sea and over the birds of the sky and over the cattle and over all the earth, and over every creeping thing that creeps on the earth.”

and this...

Genesis 1.28

God blessed them; and God said to them, “Be fruitful and multiply, and fill the earth, and subdue it; and rule over the fish of the sea and over the birds of the sky and over every living thing that moves on the earth.”

Rule over? Subdue? See the connection?

Need I say more???