The Good, The Bad And The Ugly …

… She had often heard it said, and even more frequently read it in writing, that India is a land of contradiction, and for a long time felt convinced the appraisal was a fair one, up until the day she began to contemplate the essence of the word contradiction, only to discover a glaring fault line in its employment as a description of her country, for the many features of India are neither wholly in opposition to, nor necessarily inconsistent with each other; quite the contrary, they simply co-exist, whether it be incoherently, or perhaps even complacently and unapologetically, thereby constituting a near perfect depiction of the intrinsic nature of human beings, the driving forces of which, as diagnosed by the field of neuroscience, are power, pleasure, profit, pride and permanency, the last, in many ways, the least prevalent amongst the Indian people.

For the majority of the Indian population, those belonging to the Hindu faith, both good and bad fortune appear to be predicated on the concept of Karma, defined as the sum of one’s actions in both present and past existences, which when positive, is to be celebrated abundantly, irrespective of the misfortune of others, seen as paying the price for present or past misdeeds; the deficit of what are ultimately self-satisfying demonstrations of either restraint or repentance, otherwise known as ‘wokeism’ in modern parlance, is unfairly assessed as a lack of underlying empathy or guilt, when in reality it is a by-product of the people’s passive acceptance of their earned fate, the buoyant and even somewhat proud resilience of the destitute under punishing circumstances believed to be a lucrative investment in a better next life …

… As an Italian American photographer friend of hers had once quite intuitively remarked …

‘You will never see the same blinding despair in the eyes of a slumdweller in India as you will see in those belonging to the face of a poor American living in a trailer park in the United States.’

Interestingly, one of the many contradictions India is habitually accused of is that of the brazen concurrence of abject poverty and obscene wealth, when it is in fact a universal phenomenon, but perhaps only in India will one encounter a unique relationship between rags and riches, vibrantly portrayed in the true story of a slum dwelling family who upon achieving economic prosperity, moved into an apartment complex located in the suburbs of the city of Mumbai, where they found themselves to be so lonely and unhappy, they soon returned to live in the slum; an account that might at the very least explain, if not unilaterally overrule, the alleged contradiction of rapid economic growth and slow socioeconomic development.

Indeed, India is likely to appear contradictory under the doctrines of Western ethics, dominated by deontology and utilitarianism, the former founded on a series of rules that determine whether an action is right or wrong, demanding adherence to moral decisions regardless of the consequences, the latter on a belief that an action is right if it is for the benefit of a majority, the undertones of which are similar to those of cult-like movements.

In India, moral philosophy is far more fluid and characterised as spiritual or mystical in nature, thus incapacitating yet another contradiction it is frequently condemned for, the one between spiritualism and materialism, for as certain schools of thought have already established, the ‘cartesian split’ is but a deception of the mind, which dissolves without the slightest resistance upon close scrutiny.

Perhaps the most revealing example of the imprecise lens through which India is viewed is that pertaining to the people’s attitude towards sex, the general discomfiture and specific peculiarities one sees today, according to many historians and academics, bequeathed to them by the repressive tendencies of Islamic rule, followed by the tenets of a Victorian moral code replete with hypocrisy, which quite tragically permeated their psyche during the colonial era … one can only hope that India will rediscover and restore both its former sexual liberalism and association with the divine, unabashedly represented by the erotic sculptures on the walls of the ancient temples of Khajuraho, the fulfilment of sexual desire, ‘kama’, considered by Hinduism to be one of the principal pillars of the human experience.

It was the condescending tone, tenor and vocabulary used by some foreign diplomats and residents of New Delhi, deriding India with regard to its position on the Russia Ukraine war, which not only led her to speak up in defence of her own country for the very first time, but also finally recognise many of its merits, for no matter what else it may be charged with, of the ineluctably flawed nature of man, India is a country that tells the truth, the whole truth and nothing but the truth…

… As Indian Foreign Minister Subrahmanyam Jaishankar said on Wednesday, April 27th 2022, in the course of a panel discussion at the Raisina Dialogue in New Delhi,

“We have to be confident about who we are. I think it’s better to engage with the world on the basis of who we are rather than try and please the world by being a pale imitation of what they are” …

… and thus she couldn’t help but whisper to herself, ‘Bravo, Mr. Foreign Minister, Bravo …’