United States of India

With the spurt in parts of India that want to become separate states or even breakaway from the country altogether, many feel gloomy. Telengana wants to become a separate state; and when the Center indicated that it might allow that, then people wondered whether that would be the beginning of the end, the unraveling of India. Some fear that India is splitting up. Pakistan and China’s dream come true scenario.

Let’s forget the parts that want to secede from India altogether. I find it very hard to evaluate the merits of the cases where parts of a state want to become a new, separate state. Is it just politicians whipping up feelings? Is it only because politicians want more states because that would mean more CM posts? Or are some states too big to be governed effectively? Are some states so mismanaged that parts of them feel they’d do better if they were separate? I don’t know.

Some in India complain that we seem to want to split and de-unify while the Europeans are moving towards unification. Well, that’s not entirely true. Europe is moving towards economic unification. But even there, not everyone is on board. Britain still has its pound sterling and Switzerland has its Francs. Linguistic unification in Europe? Are you kidding me? The French hate English (though I’ve heard they’ve improved on that front in recent times). The Flemish and French speaking parts of Belgium hate each other. Switzerland has 4 official languages (one for each country they share a border with). Political unification? Britain, Spain, Monaco and Holland have monarchies; France and Germany are republics. And that’s without getting into their world views: The British follow America on everything; the French oppose America on everything!

I remember a conversation I had with one of my colleagues from Finland. He was asking what is a typical Indian cuisine. I told him that in India, the cuisine, culture, language etc all vary from state to state. And how it it is impossible to say what is “Indian” as opposed to belonging to one state or the other. And he remarked, "So it sounds like it should really be called the United States of India!"

And it’s true, isn't it? Each state in India is comparable to a country in Europe! Not just in size. Each state has a different language, culture, and cuisine! And yet we are one nation...however much some states may dislike others.

America is an entity of fairly homogenous states. Yeah, yeah, the Yankees will say that the Bible belt states differ from New York and California. But c’mon, they still eat the same food, talk the same language, and celebrate the same festivals.

India's states are hugely heterogeneous. No other country in the world is a unity of such heterogeneous entities. We should take pride in what we've achieved in terms of unity. Can we be even better? Of course. But let that not detract from what we've pulled off. It's far more than any other country on the planet.

Comments

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

Student of the Year

Image
As a toddler, my daughter loved Alia Bhatt’s songs, esp. the ones from Student of the Year . (That movie did have many good songs and well-choreographed dances). Fast forward to present day, when she is 12 yo. She rarely watches Hindi movies now, but one of the few ones she likes of late, Raja aur Rani ki Prem Kahani has, yes, Alia Bhatt.   If I had any hopes that there was anything to be read in the name of her toddler-time favorite ( Student of the Year ), they have been dashed. Our conversations come exam time are perfectly captured by this photo and its caption: In fact, the pic below captures how she and I look at her answer sheets – me intently, she with an expression of “It’s over, so why are you even looking at it?”   Of late, we pull her leg and tell her that she isn’t showing any signs of academic prowess, she’d better find a rich guy to marry. Some time later, she showed us this meme on the Internet: “Me No Study, Me No Care Me Go Marry Millionaire If He Die
Read more

The Retort of the "Luxury Person"

Image
Coming up with biting and witty retorts. It’s something we dream of, but rarely manage to pull off. Worse, the more we stew over the offending remark, the more likely we are to come up with that dream retort, as Calvin ruefully points out: During our last holiday at the Taj Resort, seeing my wife carrying towels to our poolside chairs, one of the kids there mistook her for a member of the staff and asked for a towel. When my wife narrated this to us, I did not imagine that my 8 yo daughter would come up with her own retort. But a day later, my daughter recapped the incident, an incident that didn’t even involve her in the first place , and said, “You know what I’d have told that kid who asked for the towel?”. And without waiting for an answer, she told us anyway: “I don’t work here. I too am a luxury person who is living at this resort. Go get your own towel.” We were highly amused by the phrase she had coined: “luxury person”. It certainly captures the kind of holid
Read more

Animal Senses #7: Touch and Remote Touch

Instinctively, we think touch is based on contact. Not entirely true, explains Ed Yong in Immense World – there’s a more important aspect than contact: “These incredible feats are possible through movement. If you rest a fingertip upon a surface, you can get only a limited idea of its features. But as soon you’re allowed to move, everything changes. Hardness becomes apparent with a press. Textures resolve at a stroke.” As you run your fingers over a surface, they hit the tiny peaks and troughs and set off vibrations in the mechanoreceptors at their tips.   At the tip of its snout, the star-nosed mole has many pairs of hairless appendages. It uses them to touch things around itself. Alive or dead? Food or ignore? It does these movements at an insane speed. In the time it takes to blink our eyes, the star-nosed mole can probe, identify and swallow its food. “Light may be the fastest thing in the universe, but light sensors have their limits, and the star-nosed mole’s sense of
Read more