If anyone has seen the move Yeh Mera India, I they’ll know what I mean. It’s the most depressing movie I’ve seen in some time. And the saddest bit is that all of it is true. This movie compiled a lot of the most recent events, like Saif being refused that apartment because he was Muslim.
But like with all movies, this movie comes together in the end, and everybody goes home happy, or dies a death for a very noble cause. The movie did a very good play on the ‘all terrorists are Muslims’, belief, and somewhere it shows that humanity figures above all religions, castes and genders.
The evil molesting call centre boss, the cheap guy with the extremely shiny shirts, ends up saving the girl he had forcibly kissed after a bunch of realizations and a suicide attempt. The Bihari who shows up in Mumbai just like that, ends up saving the Bihari hating Police officer.
The thing that bothers me most is what the people call the ‘spirit’. After the 26/11 shootout at Taj, there were reports about how Mumbai got up the next day and went to work, which showed resilient nature they said. It shows pig-headedness I said. Is it like the entire world will stop working if 100 people are killed? No, their bosses are going to cut their wages and they’re going to go hungry if they don’t go to work.
The problem is that, in real life, it never comes together like that, a new morning and it becomes awesome. What spirit are we showing when we forget whatever happened and ‘move on’? the biggest news after the Mumbai attacks was that a heritage hotel was destroyed, that Ritesh Deshmukh decided to visit the Taj and that how Mumbai is resilient and how it’ll rise from the ashes.
First of all, the Taj isn’t the favourite hangout joint for all the middleclass families. Because it’s a favourite celeb joint, it was given excessive coverage, day and night. The next thing you know, there’s a double page feature in HT Brunch about how Vir Sanghvi will miss the Taj and its splendor, Shekhar Gupta is walking in the newly renovated hotel with Bikki Oberoi and the shiny floors are the only remembrance that something happened.
The dead are long forgotten, the disaster is pushed aside and ‘spirit’ comes into the picture, where we choose to ignore whatever happened.
Some spirit this is, when we decide to turn are heads to what is happening and decide to be ostriches and live in our own bubbles. The only ones being active in the struggle seem to be one the ones that have been directly affected by it. Does it take someone near and dear being blown up for us to care?
No, I think we should leave this spirit aside, and choose to be really really depressed about how our lives work out. Let’s show patriotism to ourselves before we decide to so towards the country. Let’s start at the most basic unit, being human. Let’s show patriotism for being humans. After that we can graduate towards religion, caste, and all kinds of other segregators.
