Breathing in Smog

In the 1940s a sizable portion of India's urban literate believed that we, as a people, didn't deserve freedom. They argued that by nature, we are conservative, timid, selfish, two-tongued and deceitful, although kinder souls. This section of our population is now dead, whatever remains are derelicts of once vibrant personalities. Sprouted in the air of freedom, the purpose of struggle for liberty was lost to the subsequent generations in the struggle for survival. The descendants of the iconoclasts had quite naturally been diverted away from India and their repugnance for its cultural inadequacies grew. India, as we know it, cannot be read, seen or understood from afar. It has to be lived, experienced and re-lived to be able to call it anything. These generations now barely represent, let alone, think, India. By the way, their rebel predecessors weren't entirely mentally derailed, to be fair. Their preference of the Raj over democracy was well founded on experiences which were usually vastly different from what the Indian democracy would have yielded. Much of this was owing to the iron hand rule of the British. Give it to the British if you wish to have efficiency and effectiveness in machines and machinery. Give it to the Goras, if you wish to have your bribe well invested- they NEVER went back on their word, no matter what. Also, they were disturbingly fair and we are not speaking skin colour here. These very virtues could be traced back to the Treta Yug, during the rule of our favorite Shri Ram- baring the instance of the bribe, that is. There were so many 'partitions' in India before the Company anchored ships with tea leaves on Bay of Bengal, that small violations were all that they needed to ignite sparks, which of course took shape of the Sepoy Mutiny. Then followed the merciless crushing of any head that rose in even objection, let alone, rebellion. Provincial Kings, meek shadows of their past glory, gave meaning to the phrase 'humble submission'. The servile Indian surfaced to dominate the landscape, not that it was the first instance. Many case-lets of tiny triumphs over the Raj were witnessed and many others lost due to lack of storytelling. It was sweet consolidation for the British thereon for a good three-four decades. They sucked out the very nectar of life from the soul of India and in its place, injected many viruses of mass incapacitation- salaries, trains, guns, English, clothes, love of fairness(we mean the color, this time) and many many more. Where the Brits went awfully wrong was the implementation of the rule. You couldn't possibly rule with a chaabuk the customer who buys from you. He pays you taxes, so that you can hoard them to fill your ageing queen's coffers half-a-world away. Rule was decentralized, but power was still in Buckingham. Besides, the iron hand may not be adequate or appropriate if you wish to rule a nation as populous and as vast as undivided India was. That's another story though. Whatever the Sahebs did or enforced, they never quite lost their core values of fairness, justice and equity. Let's state a few facts here: Number of places of worship desecrated by Brits in India- zero. (Compare that to before and after the Raj) Number of schools established to spread education- runs into thousands.(Compare that to quality, not numbers in the present) Number of Bridges built - Thousands (compare that to the number of bridges collapsing, in the present) Number of modern towns planned- all of present day India. (compare that to drainage systems, in the present) If the reader feels a subtle inclination towards the Goras, s/he is not mistaken, because the problems of the common person were in fact addressed by the Raj, albeit with revenue in mind. This brings me to the question: whether we Indians deserve Freedom today? Going by what ends we are achieving with personal, religious and political freedom, we have missed the bull's eye by a COLONIAL margin. Do we deserve another Raj today? Going by the direction in the Indian freedom fighter's compass, we might be in for worse.