The Great Indian Democracy

Lord Meghnad Desai, once when comparing India to China, commented that India can only aspire to be a good democracy, never a great nation. There is a lot which is going wrong in China, but their sheer bloody-mindedness to ensure its 'peaceful rise' is absolutely commendable. As another scholar pointed out, the Chinese go ahead and act, making mistakes but rectifying them with suitable remedial action. Apparently in India, we will just not move ahead till everything is in perfect order, because our democratic political system does not allow any mistake to be pardoned.

As Amartya Sen says, Indians have always been argumentative; highly opinionated in my opinion. Yet, today, we, the supposed liberals, cannot simply argue on a lot of reasonable issues - reservations, minority rights and appeasement, adult content, homosexuality, and what not. But on the obvious things we need to act, the debate simply never ends - administrative reforms, judicial reforms, economic growth, poverty alleviation, infrastructure. Why should anyone have anything against the building of world-class airports is beyond me? Just stand in our immigration queue once, and you will figure out what Corporate Communication means.

Take caste-based reservations. The same were introduced by our Founding Fathers to correct the historic injustice meted out to the socially-ostracised backward castes. They were based on the 1931 Census, and were supposed to wither away in ten years time, a time-frame by when the wrong was expected to be corrected. However, as we all know very well, it has just dragged on, as it is a lot more convenient to get votes this way. No politician, however sane or intelligent (including our PM and FM) can publicly take a stand on Arjun Singh's joke on educational quotas (done apparently without his party's and madam's connivance, only to resurrect his political career). How can a India, supposed to take on China, try to impose caste-based reservations in the private sector.

The bending down to the mass-opinion, which by itself is going through a worrying dumbing down, is a phenomena replicated across sectors. In the 1970s and 80s, the parallel-cinema actors - Naseeruddin Shah, Amol Palekar - used to sweep the Filmfare Awards, restricting the ruling deity Amitabh Bachchan to few select awards in his unchallenged reign at the top. I am not for or against it, but now it is much easier for the actors working in the biggest hits of the year, to walk away with the awards. Similarly, we talk about the absence of all-India hits, and multiplexes have actually promoted niche cinema. Yet, today's biggest mass-media phenomena happens to be Ekta Kapoor. Based on my extremely superficial knowledge of the contents of her productions, I can only say that whatever little craft, little art, I have witnessed in her serials is absolutely shocking. And the style is imitated across serials, across channels.

As the notorious Mr. Chappell pointed out before parting, we cannot stick band-aid on cancer (and we do love doing it). The Blue Billion was baying for blood. So to pacify the nation, the BCCI President and our Agriculture Minister, Mr. Sharad Pawar, and his elected cohorts, went ahead and decided that the players should not be models anymore. And what more, the masses, and even the classes interviewed on English News channels, loved it.

Next time when I fail to meet my sales target, or my cousin does badly in his Annual School sports meet, I will ensure that we all stop watching movies. Helluva distracting from our professions, these dumbed-down expensive-to-watch Hindi movies, and they cannot even win that bloody Oscar once.