Tuesday, July 31, 2012

Our Share of India !

Courtesy : Niagara Falls Public Library

My car has an Indian Flag on it for which I have no answer to my son's question as to  why do I keep it even though I carry a different passport? Why indeed? My answers do not convince the young man even a little bit.

A decade ago I had to learn driving an automobile again for reasons that are no longer important. My in - car instructor was a lady from Fiji. It took me some time to get used to her english but I got the hang of it after a few days.Very close to the end of our third or fourth day I made a small driving error. I was expecting her usual lilting english rebuke but what she did instead was far more astonishing. She started speaking in Hindi! I nearly hit a light pole with shock. Her accent, grammer, choice of words and form of address were so classical, chaste  and absolutely correct that It would have put a professor of hindi to shame. She was carrying her share of India in her head.  Probably from her childhood since it was her grandfather who had  left India nearly hundred years ago from a village near benaras. Her India is India as it was in the last century, learnt at the feet of her Grandfather.

Some years earlier a thirty years old Uzbek man tried to pick up a conversation with me in Tashkent during an exhibition that I had designed. I was immediately struck by his speech. He was not speaking Russian as usual . He was addressing  me in what he thought was Hindi.... It of course was quite unintelligible. Eventually I found out that he considers himself an Indian since at some unrecorded time in  history his ancestors had arrived from India. He did not know from where , he did not know how many centuries ago. But his family told him  such and thus he believed in it . This individual has a regular Uzbek name but he wanted me to address him as  "Suresh Vatkar". Some months later he sent me a letter written in Devanagari . This time he made a lot of sense. He has India in his dreams and had finally managed to teach himself the language.  He also wanted me to find a match for him  in India and  is the only individual I know who wants the right to  permanantly immigrate to India. Whatever good was ever written in books and journals about India is unquestionably  true for him. His India is an ideal place with no warts , no problems and where he will be home.

About one thousand years ago Muslim invasion of their lands made some groups in central western and northern India move west towards Persia. Eventually these groups landed in different parts of Europe. Unfortunately their ill fate followed them. They were enslaved in eastern Europe and kept beyond the pale of society in the west. Thousand years later they are still outsiders. They are  the Roma; gypsies in local parlance. Children of India who India has forgotten about and who have only a faint memory of  India . It is only in their language and social customs  that we find India alive.It is believed  that  Nazi killing machine killed more Roma than Jews and they killed millions of Jews on record.  One can only imagine what catastrophe Roma  have suffered. For them India is a far far away place , unseen , unknown and maybe on another planet. Planet they can not travel to. Although they have been constant travelers for the last thousand years. Their share is death ,destruction ,oblivion and marginalization..

Around 1500 AD Columbus "discovered" India. It was of course  not "India" but America. So the name stuck to native people of America and they came to be known as Indians. They have no idea why they should be called such and neither have I. No body discovered anything. America was already there and it belonged to the tribes that lived there . It was just snatched out of their hands and they were  given a  new name in return ; becoming pawns in the hands of their masters. Their share is just a name.

After a census was undertaken in 1961, they found 1652 spoken languages are being used in India. At the last count there were 23 official languages in which different levels of the government conduct their affairs. Simply the highest such  number in the world. 1,241,491,960 number of people live in India in 28 states and 7 union territories. Hundreds of tribes , several castes and sub castes;different faith groups and political  shades are all jockeying for a piece of it. It is surprising how anything works at all. And nothing much does anyway. Sources put India's total installed capacity for electricity generation at 203 Giga watts. Close to 33% of this electricity is lost in transmission and distribution. Whatever is available is mismanaged so badly that recently the whole electric grid failed. Not one but  three grids and that too twice....in just  one  week. 75% of the entire nation went dark. Traffic lights failed , trains and metro stopped in their tracks, production stopped, offices closed. Nearly 80 million people were affected . This was their share .

India launched her first satellite  "Aryabhatt" in 1975 but in 2012  only 28 % of Indian homes have a source of drinking water. 72% of population have no idea when can they  expect to get access to drinking water. It is an entirely different  story if the existing supply is adequate or even safe  in the first place for people who have access to it.  This is their India. India that exploded a nuclear device earlier in 1974,  today  has 3 million homeless in the capital itself  and this number rises to a mind boggling 78 million nationwide. Several individuals regularly make the Forbes list of  richest people in the world but 300 million  have no job and no income.This is their share.

India has nearly  2 million IT and ITES  professionals. They bring in 100 billion US dollars in revenue. Nearly 50,000  H1B  visa are available for them every year to go and work in  the US. Silicon valley is littered with them. These numbers are proudly touted by every organ of the government however the last I knew Government of India is stilll trying to find the number of manual scavengers  in India! 21% population  of  UP is considered dalit and backward; however when someone amongst them came to power all they got was 414 badly made elephant sculptures  and 11 life size statues of their benefactor. Conservative estimate puts the total cost of this exercise alone to 3000 million INR. This is when 13000 schools in the same state have no toilet. Diarrhea is a leading cause of childhood death there. Something that can be treated with a little salt and sugar dissolved in plain water - they do not have it!  This state also has the dubious distinction of being the home to the highest number of child labourers in the world.  2,700,000 children in another state  Bihar  do not go to school. 60,000 schools in this  state have no teacher. This can go on and on. There are 26 more states to go and 7 union territories as well!. This is their share of India.

Someday my son will understand about my car flag. That's my share of India and I happen to be the lucky one!