These days there are many Indic words in many languages , which have acquired a derogatory meaning . When you want to say Bhakt, you need to say ‘devotee’ lest you’ll be misunderstood. So have words like sanskari, behanji come to mean something else other than their original meaning. The word desi itself has come to mean something or someone obsolete or culturally retarded.
Desi food, desi attire, desi bhasha , desi anything is taboo. In Chennai, though people still have rice with lemon or tomato mix ,they would rather call it lemon rice or tomato rice rather than “thakkali saadam” or “elumichai Soru” , even while talking in Tamil.
Talking in an Indian language or the ability to read or write in an Indian language is simply not cool. Today, there are so many children growing up in India without ever learning a single Indian language in school !!.
In short, anything desi is considered shameful.
Fortunately, we have seen many great , desi human beings like Mahatma Gandhi, Swami Vivekananda , Subramania Bharati, Shri Aurobindo , to name a few. One truly awesome, desi human being in recent times was Dr Abdul Kalam. He could be a great scientist without his scientific temper coming in the way of his spiritualism, could be the President of India without losing the common touch and above all ,his continuing to teach young people did not come in the way of his own learning. He was learning to play endaro mahnu bhavaulu as he told MS Subbulakshmi , another great desi human being, during the function when she was being honoured with Bharat Ratna Award.
Once he was asked by a foreign reporter as to what was the core competence of India. He replied ” our core competence is dealing with our millions . No other country has or needs such expertise”
Whatever has to be implemented in India has to be for a billion plus population. Be it housing, power supply, water supply, employment , education, health care , conduct of elections; whatever be the issue, it takes on a different connotation when it has to be done for a billion people.
So desi samasya need desi solutions. Against this backdrop, does it make any sense to go for a downtown and suburbs model as in US? Does it make any sense to have a network of freeways and a huge number of automobiles zipping through in the peak hours, burning gallons of fossil fuel and polluting the air, beyond redemption? If we have to go by the US model we would have about a billion cars on our roads; forget about plying the cars, there would be no place to park.
Is it a rocket science to deduce that we need more of public transport and people staying closer to their workplace, meaning more number of smaller cities than a few unmanageable cities like Mumbai or Delhi ? Till 2002, Delhi did not have any mass public transport ? Many of our cities still do not have.
We cannot ban private vehicles, but they can be taxed heavily for use of roads and parking space to encourage use of public transport.
Whatever solutions or models we go far we need to think of 100,00,00,000. Or else we are just creating islands of California in a sea of sub sahara as Dr Amatya Sen put it.
I remember reading an article by Sunaitra Chaudhry where she brings out the reactions on a certain issue as seen by the ‘ have nots’. As it is fashionable these days, she turns to her maids, driver, mali, nanny, malishwalah etc for feedback. By the time i read through the article , I had counted nine people serving some member of her family in some way.
Today we see our development model in NCR as a number of gated colonies surrounded by slums occupied by economic refugees from UP, Bengal or Bangladesh.
Can we sustain this model without the socio-economic stress, building up over time.
Another thing people seem to forget is that India lies in the tropical zone.
These days one sees a lot of buildings in the cities with huge glass fronts. A tropical country like ours should have buildings with less glass to keep it cool. If air-conditioning is the solution we go far, then one has to think of a billion air conditioners and of course the power required to run them at the same time . I can’t even imagine the effect on environment of running a billion air conditioners and a billion automobiles at the same time.
I have never understood the idea of breeding Alsatians or Dobermans in a tropical country like ours. Particularly in summers these pets go through enough cruelty for PETA to wake up. But somehow these ‘dog lovers’ look to servant boys to walk their dogs, in the process littering the walk-ways with dog poop and then they depend on air-conditioners to keep them in their native (European) temperature.
The local breeds are hardier and more intelligent than these ‘phoren’ dogs, yet they are reduced to unwanted, stray animals .
Why don’t people grow jasmine bushes or parijata instead of fragrance less flowers like pansies and phlox. Even the Indian variety of creeper roses are hard to find these days in India.
About our attire, the less said, the better it is. It is moronic to see people going about in coats and ties even in palces like Chennai, and nursery school kids wearing ties is abominable.
It is so nice to see amaltas and gulmohur in bloom. Along with these, what we need is more shady trees like peepal, tamrind and neem. How have we come to the state where poplars, silver oak and eucalyptus are dominating our landscapes ??? These trees, bring down the water table , clog the drains, give no shade and snap like match sticks during monsoons!
Having done away with most native species of flora and fauna, having relegated desi languages to servant-talk, having set aside desi food and clothing for ethnic days in the office and festival days at home, we march on triumphantly towards being total copycats of the west.
What comes to my mind is Goerge Orwell’s concluding lines from the animal farm.
The creatures outside looked from pig to man, and from man to pig, and from pig to man again; but already it was impossible to say which was which