24 March 2009

SLUMDOG MILLIOINAIRE(PART 2,OF 3 PART SERIES)

It is really shocking that we rarely celebrated for genuine reasons. I believe it will be disturbing you now.So,why not do some soul searching?? Isn't it true that we have become a country ,going almost medalless in Olympics for years,a country producing rather no noble laureates,(Amartya sen, and Mother Terressa being the exceptions,but do they owe their noble to India???),a country winning no Oscar awards in decades,A country standing way behind the developed countries, in terms of per capita income,literacy,life expectancy,child mortality,disease iradication...etc... and finally to acountry which is suffering from the disease of mass amnesia. why has this situation arisen ?? I believe its answer lies somewhere in our colonial history. During British rule over India,a propaganda was always propagated that Indians are deprived of any great cultural history and that a good shelf of books of Britain will weigh heavier than all the literature India and the Arabian world has,and whatever is good and great is from west. Indians are just a bunch of snake and monkey charmers. We need not to say that this propaganda could not hold ground.Our national leaders and reformers opposed any such idea of British supremacy with recreating our own sense of history. Since independence this sense of history,the pride we can take from our own cultural heritage, slowly but steadily started evaporating. this was due to deliberate neglect of our own culture,language and history. Our social and political reformers had always stressed on modernization of society, rather than on westernization.but sadly enough we opted for westernization and even on englishization. English was promoted on the pretext of making use of it as our national and global language.We believed that English opens the doors of civilization,and can help average middle class indian in getting decent jobs. So english was promoted as progressive language,and regional languages,specially hindi, as backward language. British rulers attached language with knowledge and propagated the idea that knowledge is possible only in their language.This was just another theory put forward by an imperialist nation to tighten its command on its colonies..The idea being that once the idea of British supremacy is established in the minds of people ,it will be possible to extend the British rule for ever. It is sad but true that even after our independence we followed, what the much hated Macaulay’s minute prescribed for us way back in 1835..It is always said that during British rule such was the policy of appointment and promotion in government services that very few native people could reach to higher posts.today's case is no different.if u have to be at the top you need to learn English.Regional languages will be of no use to you.The shortcut to success passes through the island of English.It is not just about getting jobs.even in the social hierarchy English speaking persons enjoy more respect and recognition. For the elites of the society indigenous art,language and culture has become a forgotten and forbidden territory. It was due to this policy of neglect of our language,our history,our culture that the indian state failed to reduce the inequality between the previlaged and underprevilaged.it was nothing but a cruel joke with millions of people to ask them to learn english and adopt a western way of life,to move up, in the ladder of prosperity.amid the rhetoric of welfare state the indian poor who lacked the resource to equip itself with modern day education, kept getting marginalized and overlooked.this callous neglect of masses for decades widened the chasm between the rich and the poor,the previlaged and undeprevilaged.the neo-liberal pursuit of indian state has only helped in widening this chasm further.At the one side of the chasm is a vibrant, prosperous,and simmering India,and on the other side lies the neglected India,langushing in abject poverty. For many it may look interesting that this year's two major creative pieces,which has shifted world's focus on India, deals with the phenomena of two India within an India.

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