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India. A Concept. An Idea.

My country has been studied, interpreted, discussed and judged. Whenever I read something about India, I ask myself, 'Has this person, whether Indian or outsider, really understood my country?'
I haven't yet arrived at an answer. Is it that difficult to understand a people? May be. May be not. Many 'celebrated' writers and thinkers have arrived at conflicting conclusions, and most of them are right in their viewpoint, but only in parts. No one has been able to comprehend the potpourri of contradictions that is India, wholly.
And then there are some who have fallen headlong into the muck of prejudice against India -- the weight of a prejudice they themselves lugged along even as they set foot in the country for the first time and emptied here. They are helped in the offloading by some of our own. Our cotton-clad, agenda-pushing men & women go abroad, attend seminars, charity balls, write columns in 'first world' newspapers, and drown the voices of true nationalists by their trumpet-blowing about India's poverty, filth and imaginary non-tolerance. The intellectual glow that lights up their collective faces when they deride the nation gets them foreign funds, sympathy and awards.
I quite agree that India looks dirty, unorganised, chaotic and a banana republic. Patriot to the core that I am, I feel that we Indians have every right to criticise our country, but others don't.
I know we haven't been easy to understand. We are a confused lot. But, if anyone is truly interested -- be it Indian or a foreigner -- to know this land, they should empty their minds of preconceived opinions donated to them by the Mayos, Roys, Donigers and Churchills. All they have to do is, come and stay in the villages, chat with men and women whose knowledge of the 'phoren' is limited to that word and travel in dusty-rickety buses to places not found on google.

There, they will gradually discover the idea of an India that is not perceived in the learned letters of enlightened men and women. An idea that we too can discover if we look for it in the eyes of our fellow countrymen -- the philosophy of taking life in its stride.

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