Friday, January 22, 2010

Regional divide- the latest trend!!

We reside in a country where a catholic lady steps aside for a sikh to be sworn PM of the world’s largest democracy by a Muslim President (Namastey London). I felt proud when I heard this dialogue & realized how true it was...a good change from the Babri masjid, Godhra riot days. We all know that the whole religionist attitude is not over..lets be realistic, it can’t be over.We can’t expect more than 1 billion people to suddenly decide to be more tolerant, more secular. But, we the people of India, are secular enough to keep our religionist views aside while choosing leaders of our country. No one could imagine this 20-30 years ago. Now thats a change – a good one too. Proud…absolutely!!

Now think about this…only marathi speaking taxi drivers in Maharashtra; a minster being slapped in Parliament for taking oath in our national language; job reservations for people of a particular state……..Amazing!!!!!

Is region taking the place of religion?? i hope not. Are we so pathetic that we always need a reason to define our boundaries..our territories..our groups?? Fighting for caste, religion is passé now.. the latest trend is - demand for a new state, reservations based on states, infrastructure for a particular region or even murder due to interstate / region marriage. Come to think of it, all this is replacing the ‘reservation for minorities’, ‘caste fights’, ‘ murder due to intercaste marriage’ columns in newspapers.

The trend continues in TV serials as well..Now we have a saas bahu serial for almost each state – Gujrat, Rajasthan Punjab, Haryana … watch it to believe it.

We read about globalization, merging of boundaries & at the same time Pakistani players are left out of IPL bidding..We don’t need to delve upon it especially when we are talking about increasing the number of states in our own country. And what not is being done achieve it: fasts, strikes, speeches..The involvement of people is so high that we had astrologers on news channels to predict the number of states at end of 2010. And then we talk about how we are are emerging as one of the best countries to be in right now. Just imagine how difficult it would be for the coming generations to remember the names of all states (& their capitals too).

Well, I guess we Indians need a reason to argue / fight among ourselves & we don’t need help from outside; we find the reasons ourselves, from within us.