Protection is good. Sometimes it helps nurture the blossoms to flowers and seeds to fruits. But many-a-times, the fruit doesn’t see daylight, hence not armed with to fight the toil of life and thereby, fails. Frail and weak, the fruit drops off, without giving any of its ‘expected’ or desired results.
Coming to real world too, we’ll have plenty of examples. Kids coming from too protective families often fall prey to ragging, out-of-couch feelings and die an early death. Poetically speaking, ‘Death of middle class Indian dollar dreams’!!
I have somehow experienced it in leaps and bounds over the past year. How racism is born, how caste divides are nurtured and how differences are kept in the blood, which surprisingly has its roots in the very way people are brought up. I read somewhere, parents bragging about giving their offshoots the ‘Indian value’ teachings! And our first lady of Bengal, Mrs. Dona Ganguly retorted that teachings aren’t taught but imbibed and taken up from the milieu they’re brought up in. true. But that’s what serves as the spice powder in the soul curry!
Often the way a Bengali lad is taught about their cuisine leads them to struggle for living in the tamarind-exhaustive southern part and the way a vegetarian Marwari boy is fed leads them to get their hands a kilometer off from all the chicken-friendly classes! But there weren’t any stones unturned and any (book) pages/ leaves unopened when they were ‘educated’. But somehow the problem of having the world’s second largest democracy has its bottleneck… we are different, and so bloody different that our blood is the only thing common between us.
Come to religion, it depends on region. Come to cuisine, it comes to coastal non-coastal, come to political turbulence or economic upheaval, it falls under territory-based exuberance or nonchalance. The ‘indianness’, an ever-elusive term, becomes more so, when presented to the inside-world, but surprisingly opposite when presented outside. Abroad, all Indians are desis and hindi-bengali-marathi-tamils eat from the same plate! Or do they? Do there also we are not stung by the tetuls, the roshogollas, the achars and the tandoors? Then why boast about something intransient, inculcated and inherited?
If there’s something called an open question, then maybe this is one the most important of them all. We are all united when the national anthem is played, bar the north-indians who think ‘sare jahan se achha’ would have suited India better!!! And there are chain mails about how ‘Jana gana’ was written actually to insinuate the British Empire. Always prone to an empirical-structure, be it the Mughal, British or the Gandhi (ahh, I like that!), we have been anti-incumbent and accumbency-lovers. You can call us hypocrites, but we have it in our blood!
I spotted a red clutter in my restroom the other day. I could get what it is and I left it at that. Yesterday I saw that is cleared and the remnants helped me understand that that was actually an unused old red towel. It decomposed to such an extent, that it became a heap of red dust particles. Someone told me a weird reason for not taking bath everyday… “If a towel is regularly put in a bucket of water then what happens to it? It rots. So is our body!!” well, my forgotten friend, here’s a polar opposite of your story. Don’t wash it for a long time and it decomposes. To particles… to molecules, to atoms and to some other little-known, much-spent God-particles, Higgs-bosons!!! But it decomposes.
And I have seen them decompose.
