There is a
myth that has been going around for about 6½ decades in our country, which we tend to
present to foreigners to earn brownie points as well as to deceive ourselves. I do it all the time. This self-deception can
be explained in terms of cognitive dissonance, which is used to describe the
feeling of discomfort stemming from holding conflicting beliefs and trying to
adjust those beliefs to reality.
India is
a secular, democratic country with freedom of thought, expression, blah, blah. This is the myth which has been
drummed into us by our textbooks and our government over the years. The
sentence has a few extra words. Let’s try to take those out. India is a secular, free, democratic country with freedom of thought, expression, blah,
blah. Now that is more like it. India is a country, blah, blah. This
is a fact and I hope no group would be offended by it.
Still, we
have to be careful. So I’ll take the blah, blahs out too. India is a country, blah, blah. I’m happy with that, and
hopefully nobody will like me on his/her buttbook bedspread, or friend me or
tweet or chirp me or crap on me. I don’t want to see horrible things like what
happened to those two girls or the cartoonist in Mumbai, the guys in Calcutta, the
professor in Muvattupuzha, etc., happening to me.
Cognitive
dissonance – You have freedom of speech, but you can’t criticize anything and
in some cases not even comment on it as an impartial outsider. If you do, you
get #$%@ed. This is especially true in the case of religious and caste-based
groups, groups with narrow parochial interests, politicians and officials.
Surprisingly, or should I say unsurprisingly, the left is also intolerant of
criticisms as author Paul Zacharia found out in Kerala. I initially thought he
was being irresponsible by not filing a case against those thugs, but later on
I could understand why he did that. The threat of physical violence is always
there and your fame may not be enough to protect you.
So, I think
it will be wise to act kinda like the three wise monkeys – see nothing, hear
nothing, and speak nothing. I added a fourth monkey. Smell nothing. You can’t
forget that. The stink!
G'bye.
