We are That and More… !

I realize that I am not the only person to have come in support of Amir Khan. And no, he is not my favourite actor, nor am I a minority supporter. So now that we have the preliminaries sorted, I can write about issues which irk my nerves almost every day.

I came back home yesterday after a long day and switched on my internet to dive into the obscenities of the world. The one that was raking up a storm was about an actor who had chosen to speak about the intolerance in our nation and how it bothers his wife to an extent that they have thought about quitting India. Now Amir is not just any other actor… he is someone who has consciously done roles and characters and worked on stories which depict the highs, lows and glows of India. He has worked on a television show which has made people aware about issues which are best swept under the carpet… issues such as the atrociousness of criminalizing homosexuality, the lives of manual scavengers, rash driving and road accidents, the travails that assail transgenders and more. He is not perfect, but he tries extremely hard to embody all that is real and sane. And he talks sense. You cannot take that away from him. But this is not the first time we have found a scapegoat in him. Remember PK?

What have we ever done to be granted the right to utter absurdities about him, to be all patronizing about the fact that despite being a (Muslim) actor, he is a top star in our country and should be grateful about it? And we – who are nagging him for divulging what his wife thinks – are we all “tolerant” ourselves? Do we even know what the term means? That is precisely why the festival of Dussehra has never appealed to me. How can we clap and rejoice while setting some “other” person on fire for being evil when we have no idea how degraded our own souls are. Do you realize how many layers of intolerance we are covered with? No? Here’s a reality check. You do remember that homosexuality is still a criminal offence in India? But how does that matter… because India is a land of tolerant heterosexuals… right? And yeah, the Sex Ratio in most northern states says so much about our levels of tolerance.

Also, most of us who call ourselves secular are anything but that. You don’t agree with me? Okay, if you are a Hindu or a Sikh, go tell your parents that you wish to marry a Muslim girl/boy or vice-versa. You’ll know what I mean. Most of us who criticize the RSS have the most cringe-worthy regressive tendencies of our own. I have heard my own people talk of religious conversion as if it’s their birthright. Don’t shake your heads in disbelief because you know it’s true. We have put on a mask of secularism but we are a good 100 years away from it. And we won’t live that long to see it happen. Not in this body at least.

We are tolerant? How many of us eat in the same plate as we offer to our helpers and cleaners? I was commuting in the metro the other day and a black woman came and sat with me. The girls sitting on the parallel seats started staring at her and whispering in each others’ ears about God knows what. A couple of my housemates keep passing acerbic remarks about Karan Johar or any other man who is even slightly effeminate, comments which smell of we all know what. And we are talking of educated new-age people here.

I love India, just like Amir (and Shahrukh). That is why I haven’t walked away from it even when I had and still have the opportunity. But it is not as if I have never considered that as an option… for the simple reason because India is a country of extremes. It is beautiful but it is beastly. It is a country of ragas and rapes, where the concept of “purity and pollution” still reigns supreme. It is a country where we are too easily influenced and too eager to be sheep… a land of saints and meditation where nobody wants to look within, a land where religion and politics work in tandem to shoot the sitting ducks, where the media feeds people with utter nonsense day in and day out and we happily burp on it, where we want more and more drama to satiate our hollow lives. We are not Indians… we are bigots who deserve nothing but pity.