Cowboys and Indians: a short clip
on this magnificent tree.”
“Go ahead and keep saying it’s all about respecting social custom and cultural values, when it’s all about defending your position at the top of a wildly skewed power pyramid, you paleolithic moron. Social custom should be an opt-in, we can all choose to live differently. We’re backed up by constitutionally guaranteed personal liberties. We’re backed up by a justice system that safeguards minority rights, even if that minority is one person against 1.2 billion others. You just hate the idea of losing the ability to perpetrate countless injustices and human rights abuses under the veil of social tradition.”
“You keep droning on about the state’s duty to maintain law and order and protect those you feel are under threat? You’re so funny. Do you know how fast a mob can be mobilised? Have you any idea how many policemen might be in the mob? How many of your friends? How many elected representatives? That’s because this is who we are. Keep off the toes of those higher up than you, and make enemies at your own peril, because the informal, spontaneous law and order economy is much more efficient than the local cop station. In the real world, you earn your place by being acceptable to the people around you. Pointless confrontation is not the Indian way. Hindus are smarter than that.”
“Oh please, this isn’t some kind of banana republic, you cow-obsessed control freak. Many systems work, and when they don’t, there is recourse. Social change takes confrontation, and for every silent sufferer there’s also someone raising hell. We have a long tradition of spiritual and intellectual thought that thrives on dissent and critique. We have overthrown an empire, largely peacefully, and don’t intend to substitute it with domestic oppression. We have institutions, we have a free and vocal press, and most of all, we have large numbers of peaceful, decent, kind people who have lived together for thousands of years and will continue to do so long after you’re done trying to divide them and screw them over.”
“Try descending from your Western-built, Western-funded ivory tower, you irrelevant idiot, and leave your filthy beefsteak upstairs. Here in the real world, we don’t provoke people just because the Constitution says we can, we don’t valourise rationality over belief. We have overthrown an empire, and we don’t intend to continue to be colonised by vestigial factotums like you. Most of all, we have large numbers of peaceful, decent, kind people who have lived together for thousands of years and will continue to do so long after you’re done arrogantly spitting on their cultural beliefs.”
“Okay bye, I’ve got to go to the temple to pray that my kid doesn’t marry outside the community.”
“Okay bye, I’ve got to go check on my meat-processing plant.” Mwah, mwah. This is broadly the kind of conversation we’ve been experiencing, though with a lot more swear words involved. Everyone seems to agree that a) we want freedom of one kind or another, and b) that we’ll all keep living together in our messy, fractious fashion, losing a few people now and again, but hey, there are a lot of us and we’ll somehow keep going. We simply cannot agree on the better way to do it. As ever, the best description of who we are and how we should be, lies somewhere in between — or, rather, infuriatingly encompasses all of the above. No wonder we have such a love-hate relationship with ourselves.
As the UPA government ceded to Narendra Modi’s BJP (much before the actual election in May 2014), we lost nuance. Forget public discourse — even in our private conversations and lives we tend to reduce each other to either colonial relic or chaddiwalla. I like to think that most of us are neither. There may always be unbridgeable belief gaps, but there will also always be the common belief that this is a country worth fighting about, if only because it’s all we’ve got.
But just to be clear, if it’s a choice between cowboys and many kinds of Indians, I’m firmly on the side of the Indians.