Why are we like this only?

We in India like to declare (with a certain bullheaded pride) that "We are like this only."

No one ever questions 'Why "we are like this only"?' No one asks if this is the best "this" for us right now. Is "this" it?

Well, until a brave few stand up and start asking those questions, I am going to ponder on the why "this" is.

The proximate answer is two-fold. One is the immense population of the country and the other is a multi-thousand year history as a country headlined by the still effective social cudgel - the caste system.

To these, I want to add another reason. Indians are afraid of art.

My favorite conundrum as an angsty teenager was whether art imitates life or vice versa. I thought then that life leads art because art exists inside life.

Man, was I the quintessential iamverysmart kid who says words he doesn't understand or what!

My sentiment now is that not only does art not imitate life, in fact, art "leads" life.

And this is where India, as a society, is failing itself. We are so afraid of being laughed at, misunderstood, ignored, or even killed that our art has stagnated around familiar tropes, themes, and memes.

Movies

Where other countries make movies on the human condition (Amores Perros on imdb), sex (In The Realm Of The Senses on imdb), we are still struggling to address a topic like Tourettes Syndrome (Hichki on imdb)for what it actually is and instead, frame it inside a feel-good redemption story. While the movie was great to watch, society is being treated with kid gloves by Bollywood and we are stunting our shared mental maturity by letting them stay well within the envelope instead of trying to push it further.

Why is no one making a Deep Throat or a Brokeback Mountain? Crossdressing men are a staple of every train ride in India. What will it take for their story to be told?

Heroes

The biggest heroes we celebrate today were thousands of years old when the Common Era started and this situation doesn't seem to be likely to change. This country has produced giants like Gandhi, Nehru, Guru Nanak, and Akbar. We have present day superheroes like Narayan Murthy who introduced India to the world and upended how the world does business.

Yet, we hardly know anything about such people as human beings.

We whitewash their stories. We reduce them to caricatures - the mahatma, the chacha, the teacher, the great mughal - and in the process, we lose our shared humanness which could have taught us how to be superheroes ourselves.

Music

We don't invent new music forms any more because we are confident that our ancient styles need no younger siblings.

While black culture gave the world rap and jazz in just the 20th century, what new music has emerged from India? It's a crying shame that a country of a billion people doesn't have the fucking balls to invent a new instrument, a new style, a new approach to the vocal arts.

A capella. EDM. Music from noise. Music from everyday objects. None of them got invented here. Why? But yes, we have a hundred singers willing to set bhajans to Bollywood tunes and a hundred thousand pandals willing to play this derivative noise all night long to show our devotion to God.

Art

We threw M.F. Hussain out of the country because this 80-year old man apparently hurt the sentiments of 800 million people. Let that sink in for a second - a multi-thousand year civilization which absorbed blows from the Mongols, from the British, from famine, from the collapse of the Harappan civilization - reduced to a quivering mess of hurt sentiment because a frail old man depicted a goddess in less than flattering light.

Where other countries got Cubism and Impressionism and OpArt and Andy Warhol, we got mobs of vigilante justice baying for a grandfather's blood.

While I am extremely proud of our ancient temples (famous for their erotic sculptures and art), don't you dare show a tit or a dick in your painting lest my hurt feelings set fire to your house and murder your kids on the street.

What can we do about it?

We need to embrace the freedom of speech in the public sphere. We need to stop getting our panties in a twist the minute someone challenges our deepest beliefs. We need to protect and cherish one another's craziest ideas.

We need to stop holding our crazy inside. We need to let it out. We need to express ourselves.