Fifty Shades of Grey – India Style
Ha! Got you on reading the article. This
is no attempt to introduce you into erotic reading but just describing the
political scenario in India. Every youngster (and this comes from my nephew) is
confused, literally grey and polarized.
What to do, on one hand we have a n individual who symbolized the IIT
dream and the successive rise into a government job who then went on the
warpath and gave it up to singlehandedly revolutionize the system and promising
us Utopia. India where there was no corruption, a country where jobs were for
all, adequate electricity and water, and rights for the down trodden, the
common man, the Mungeri lal! Then on the other side we have a right wing
mammoth who has taken India by the storm by his clever speeches, the meteoric
rise form a chai wallah to heading a successful govt in Gujarat but who can
never erase the blot of communal riots. Those riots haunt him, and he never
clears but answers back with clever rhetoric and challenging the other character
in the arena. Pappu and Madam ji.
Pappu ji, gave his first interview and
just bungled as a kid who learnt by rote an essay on The Cow and kept on
answering the same answers for everything. I don’t know about his vision for
the system it is just juvenile and nothing concrete for the India of tomorrow.
Yes, he is a romantic figure and girls swoon over him, but romance isn’t going
to run a country!
There is also the ubiquitous third front
leader, colorful characters who add the necessary drama, the right amount of blackmail,
the essential caste drama, and the very fact they can befool large percentage
of our population that is rightly the Aam Janta. India is a country that is
sitting on an explosion keg, the youth that is swayed by fundamental rights,
emotions, high drama. They are a percentage that get riled up with emotion who
have been brought up on virtual networking, face book viral statuses updates, a
generation that is more connected to the umbilical cord of whatsapp, snap chat
now. They are an instagrammer gen-x who are at once highly private but have
their lives on display on their profiles once you break into their secret
coven. I know for a fact, I have four boys now young men in the household.
It is a precarious situation where we
need to tell them about the lessons of life not by Bollywood rang de Basanti ,
or Bhagat Singh the revolutionary but by the ground reality and the permutation
and combinations of life. Maybe I am getting in my dotage , that I tell them to
be patient and not be enamored by politics, this quick rise, make money get
rich , have big car syndrome image of our leaders.
It is best for them to realize that life
is grey and nothing is black and white as they believe in and coalition is the
fifty shades of India.
Ravneet Sangha
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