NOTE:This was the article I wrote for the What's My ID Contest for Youth Ki Awaaz. I won a Nokia Lumia 710 and an internship with them. Here's the picture :
Today, every child, by the sole act of his birth, acquires multiple tags, which already define him before he or she can logically think. When a foreign dignitary visits India, the first lesson they learn is of our cultural integrity, but they never learn of our inhumane and excruciatingly complex divide. May it be on the geographical distribution of states, or of the language rolled off their tongues, we have a nasty little intuition to immediately separate each other out. It’s interesting to note that most of the geographical and language issues are simply banal. Consider this: at the time of our independence, we had 15 odd states which today stand at 28. Looking at certain separatist movements, we may see an increase in the number. But the point that stands out is that over time, fragmentation, re-merging of areas, division etc stops mattering because over the years, the only common link geographically between people has remained that of belonging to a common nation- India.
Moving on to the touchy issue, caste based discrimination. It’s not that we are not trying to move past it. With each passing generation, the emerging youth of India has slowly worked towards making it a figment of history. Unfortunately, our social stigmas and laws haven’t caught up. As a child when my mother taught me equality, I often thought “How can I say XYZ is equal to me when he gets a reservation in educational institutes, government jobs and many other such similar offerings while I don’t?”
Bringing in the gender divide, I slightly start feeling disgusted. For a nation which claims to believe and worship in a goddess, we are simple brutes. As a staunch advocate of equality among women, I simply find myself in dearth of a true identity, because associating myself with any of them highlighted here, causes a revulsion in me.
Identity. The word itself resonates a feeling of unity, of oneness and in true essence, describes the individual persona of each person. Sadly, as an Indian who is still in his growing years, I’ve discovered that I have multiple facades, multiple descriptions associated with me. Why, is a question I’m yet to answer, because the search goes on. In India, you never have a single identity. It’s always a concoction of many different ones. But whatever the potion may be and whoever may be the brewer, one thing is apparent and crystal-clear. Something is wrong, and we must change. I hope we change. Soon, Fast and Now
Hey Sidhharth, that was a volley of articles after a long lull and I was ill prepared to catch them. So now I read them all one by one. Here I go....
ReplyDeleteYou are a pretty sensitive teenager as is obvious from your writings. I admit the kind of identity crisis youth is going through and things were no different when I was in my teens. So nothing has improved over these 20 years, has certainly gone worse with regional and communal forces making their clasp go tight. on every level discrimination is widening its horizon and people are falling prey to it. The more I think about it the more I find future dismal.
Completely true. Before we can even think to create our own identity, we find that there is one based on divides and discrimination already waiting for us.
ReplyDeleteAlso, where is the equality when 49% of seats everywhere are reserved. We are imparted with knowledge of equality in hopes of creating a better nation, but how are we to do that when all we can feel is resentment towards the current system?
As you said, something is wrong and that something needs to be changed NOW.