Are we, Indians still stuck in the feudal ages?

It seems as though Indians have not moved on since the Queen’s men left us in 1947. Apart from divisions of religion and states, we are still quite divided on the lines of oppressed and the oppressor. We love teaching our loving kiddos - Humanity is a vital part of all religions. Do we ourselves really practice that? It’s like the old saying – British chale gaye, apni chhap chhod gaye. It’s so visible among all of us…within us and around us. Our caste system or the religion divides just act as a tool to use oppression by the haves against the termed lower and deemed to oppressed – ‘The have nots’. The most recent example being a minister slapping a Bank manager in A.P., for defying his orders to speed up proceedings for loans to SCs and STs. It has taken birth from an understanding that the people at higher posts are meant to exploit the country’s aam Janta - The same Janta that votes and forgets to ask for accountability. And of course anything added with a garnishing of the word SCs and STs sounds tasty. Nepotism or Bhai bhatija waad is one of the by-products of an urge to have an ability to exercise power over our fellow humans. And the worst is not a part of the political arena at all. Each and every Indian feels satisfied only when he can exert his will on others, else life is miserable. Every one of us would love to oppress our maids, mazdoor or drivers. Dare they defy orders, none of us would hesitate to punish and give them extra work to do with lesser wages. We would never dither from slapping our maid’s child for touching our baby’s dolls but would only say – ‘Arreee beta kuchh nahi hota, nayi aa jayegi’ when our own child loses it or worst still, breaks it.

In fact this stops nowhere. Dilliwalas would love to oppress the UP bhaiyas, Mumbaikars would love to squeeze out more from Bihari babus…The big town techies and industrialists first try to evade tax and later make tamasha on having to share the infrastructure growth with migrants from other states. Where is “humara Bharat ek hai” spirit? In fact where is the Humara Bharat?? Its all in our blood, splattered everywhere. We employ people with bare minimums for work expecting them to be our slaves, forgetting all human rights non-sense we have ever read. Excuse me?!! It’s all about the Africans or the tortured workers in mills. And then cry over we being suppressed by our MNC heads on similar grounds. We may not falter in any of our attempts to single out ourselves as the better ones from the masses but if someone else tries and keeps us a part of the masses, we make a hue and cry over it and call him/her discriminating against us. What bloody chauvinists!!! Despite being born Indians, been brought up as Indians - we all have a British tendency alive in us i.e. to discriminate on the basis of power.

Many of us are karma yogis on the wrong side of understanding. We are on a chase of a wild goose with power of dreams, thinking if we have money we’ll have it all. We’ll be able to buy it all and thus control it all. And to us power means never to bow down in front of anyone, not to be enslaved by anyone else ever again. In the course we forget what harm we are causing to the nation we pledged to build. We march ahead stamping a lot of goodwill and blessings we could have got by just being good. Becoming what we fear from, overlooking the fact that every animal in the food chain is important and rise or fall of population in any one of them would have consequence on the whole environment and eventually survival of many at large.