#letsfixthis

It's human nature to either romanticize, or demonize the past. Throughout history we have cherry-picked moments and glorified them to such hyperbolic extents that they seem to show little or no semblance to the truth. We often talk about how the Great Mughal Empire had a fair and just Emperor in Akbar, or how the great Maratha kingdom valiantly resisted the British. Similarly we scrutinize and criticize Aurangzeb, to such barbaric extents that his very name is now blemished with Hindu blood, for demolishing temples and diluting festive celebrations. We seldom talk about how he clamped down on Muhorram or Eid festivities, or the fact that he destroyed many mosques as well. Simply put we favor certain facts over others.

One such "Fact" is  that India would be better off today had the British not landed on our shores. My opinion on the matter, while seemingly glum and glib, is not contradictory to the statement made above; but, is mostly tangent to it. There is no denying that the British Empire left us stranded in the middle of a sea of blood, but what is preposterous to me is the fact that we have done so little to swim shore-wards, and I believe the main perpetrator in this stalemate, is our mentality. Every minute we spend dwelling on 'What could have been' and 'What should have been', we lose precious time to deliberate on 'What can be' today, and 'What will be' tomorrow. This deep seeded predicament shows up all too frequently since our independence, and in varying forms with varying degrees of severity. We snailed along during the entire Nehruvian period of politics, only later to find ourselves waging wars with our neighbors. We destroyed 500 year old architecture to settle a communal spat, only later killing hundreds more in one of the bloodiest riots seen by this country. We find ourselves adding more and more communities to the backward classes list rather than uplifting them, over 70 years after independence. Seeing all this happen all I feel is a perverted sense of penance, that our children keep paying for sins committed long before we could even fathom of a republic now known as India. "Indian shores are crying" - such personifications of our Motherland are in vain if we can't reach into our pockets to hand her a handkerchief!

Coming back to central point of this diction, India was broken long before the British came; they merely maimed us further, and we are now ambushing what's left of this beautiful country. While we continue to blame the British for our plight, I write this to question their culpability for the years after our dis-junction. The vilification of our past has made us blissfully ignorant of our responsibility to rebuild our empire from irrelevance, to the pinnacle of world repute. When Dr. Kalam said India would be a superpower by 2020 he saw the potential that lies dormant in this diverse, populous and hungry republic. What we failed to do in the interim was realize this potential. We are still squabbling with each other with little or no regard for the fact that however diverse we may be we are still locked in jousting the same demons that terrorize this country and leave us petrified.