India: From Midnight to the Millennium

In his portrait of one of the world's most important and interesting countries "India: From Midnight to the Millennium", Shashi Tharoor speaks about "a kind of Indian almost unrepresented in Indian politics."

My kind of Indian.

"There are many of us, but, among India's multitudes, we are few. We have grown up in the cities of India, secure in a national identity than a local one, which we express in English rather than any Indian language. We rejoice in the complexity and diversity of our India, of which we feel a conscious part, we have friends of every caste and religious community, and we marry across such sectarian lines. ... We are secular, not in the sense that we are irreligious or unaware of the forces of religion, but in that we believe religion should not determine public policy or individual opportunity.

And, in Indian politics, we are pretty much irrelevant.

We don't get a look in. We don't enter the fray because we can't win. We tell ourselves ruefully that we are able, but not electable. We don't have the votes, there are too few of us, and we don't speak the idiom of the masses. Instead we have learnt to talk about political issues without the expectation that we will be able to do anything about them."

My feelings exactly. A number of incidents led to this conclusion on my part:

1. When I voted for the first time this May I couldn't help wondering how my kind of vote plays any role. No candidate came to my apartments to campaign, although I did see them "waving the wave" in an adjacent lower income locality. The candidates' promises hardly make any difference to me. I would treat them with a kind of indifference bordering on hostility should they approach me at all. Why am I voting? What difference does it make whether I vote or not??

2. As of Q1 2008, the following two movies were declared box-office hits: Jodhaa Akbar and Race. I had only seen the first and did not think it deserved to be a hit. All my friends who saw Race told me that it takes infidelity to dizzying heights and can easily rank amongst the worst movies ever made. I saw Race later, and although I have seen worse movies, if this is a hit, then God save the world. (Race was obviously not made for someone like me. Come to think of it, which movies in the past were made for someone like me and were box office hits?)

Sometimes I am consumed by a feeling of helplessness, followed by guilt for not having the guts to enter the fray and give back to my country by using my education to provide efficient solutions to lingering problems.

Does writing about it help, I wonder.