Superstar INdia Excerpts - 6

I’m amazed that with all our new-found success in virtually every field, including fashion, we are still enamoured of all things Western. Is it just a hang-over from the colonial past? But then, our youth (remember, over 50 per cent of our one billion people are under thirty-five years old) have no recall of pre-Independence India. They neither know nor care what happened sixty years ago. They’re far too busy enjoying the here-and-now. A Shakira concert generates more excitement than if Charles and Camilla come a-calling. It is the grandparents who can still remember a time when the goras ruled. And, shocking as it sounds, a few from that generation speak nostalgically about how wonderful life used to be when the ‘saabs and memsaabs’ ruled India. One feels sorry for them, especially if they happen to be educated. It’s another thing to hear a seventy-five-year-old bearer in one of those ancient clubs in, say, Coonoor, going on and on about what a pleasure it used to be to serve gora tea estate managers, and how well-behaved their baba-log were compared to the junglee bachchas of today’s natives. ‘India was better off under the British’—one can still overhear such comments, spoken without shame or self-consciousness. As and when I do, I seethe a little, bristle a little, but keep quiet. Not because I think every Indian has to be unconditionally pro- India, but because I feel it’s shameful to want to go back to virtual slavery, regardless of how enlightened and terrific the masters were. No self-respecting individual would (or should) want to endorse non-freedom. But such is the paradox in our perplexing country!