National Integration in India

While studying somewhere in class 7 or 8, there was a concept described in the Social Science book that indian constitution defines the principle of "Unity in the diversity" (I studied it in hindi "anekta mei ekta" was the precise concept). I remember that this one sentence had a great impact on my mind, even then also, and I thought about its meaning a lot. But the only thing my teacher was able to explain that it means that we have all the independent governments in the states but still they are tightly bound with the central government in the center so this explains pretty much. But the one most important thing which I thought that it expresses is the feeling of belonging to the one single nation despite of having too much dissimilarities in terms of religions, language, culture and quite a lot other things. The feeling of the word "India" is the key. But it is very disheartening to see that all of these feelings are seemingly lost among the common people of India and looks like it has been changed to "diversity in unity" and the term "unity" has taken a back seat. Although I would say that still there would a lot of people who are living with the same sense of integrity towards the country but if it is lost in even 10% of people then also it is a matter of huge concern to the nation.

Wherever I see, looks like just everybody is thinking about the region, state, caste, religion. The nation seems to be lost. If some north indian goes to Mumbai then there is Raj Thackrey opposing them. If Srikanth selects Murali Vijay in the indian cricket team then people start saying that he is doing partiality with the Tamilnadu people (Which he may or may not be doing actually). If there is some IPL match is going on, people start to spit venom on other states like hell. Just today, I was reading the news of KKR beating DD in an IPL match and people were cursing bengalis like anything for no good reason. Ask the people from Southern part of India who are working in Delhi/NCR or the people from north India who are working in Chennai/Bangalore and they will tell that how difficult they feel to survive in those conditions. I personally know some people who will not leave any chance of going outside India but would not work in a different region in India. If people from North east come to other parts of country, most of the people treat them as foreigners. If some hindi speaking people reach certain parts of North east, there is a little chance of coming back safely. Kashmir problem is well known, certain fraction of people don't want to be with India. Look at the situation in Assam, there is a group ULFA(United Liberation Front of Asom) who demands a "sovereign" Assam state and fighting against India and then there was a group BLTF (Bodo Liberation Tiger Force) who was demanding bodoland carved out of Assam. Although BLTF signed a peace agreement with the Indian government in 2003 and laid down the arms (thank god at least one problem resolved). These are just examples of these kind of problems, some very small and some very big and complex. And both are very bad for the society, small ones are bad because they happen every day on small things and common man like me and you are involved in the feeling of hatred towards other states/regions, while the bigger ones don't need any explanation that why they are dangerous - innocent people are loosing lives every day.
Then I started thinking that why is it like this in India. As a 10-15 year old kid it seemed to be all fine, what happened suddenly to the country. And I found that I was wrong as a kid, it was never fine. The roots are well into the history. After the great samrat Ashoka, till the time of Britishers, no other emperor had the full control of the modern day Indian territory. Ashoka ruled somewhere around 275 B.C. So, it is a long time since then. His kingdom was stretched from Iran till Bangladesh and from Afghanistan till Tamilnadu. After this the Indian kingdom kept on dividing into small sections ruled by different rulers. After that only the mughals were able to take control of a larger part of India but that also was no where compared to Ashoka. And the problem was that mughals were also outsiders so I can't imagine the majority of people having the integrity towards mughal empire. Moreover even in the mughal empire there were lots of small kingdoms ruled by other rulers either independently or just in the flagship of the mughal empire. And situation got worsened during British time period, there were several princely states under so many different rulers. Lets take the example of the present day Jammu and Kashmir, it was mostly ruled by some rajput rulers and some muslim rulers, who used to take help from mughals against the sikh rulers of Punjab in the event of and attack from sikhs. Once mughals got weak, the sikhs defeated almost all rulers of J&K and took control of the territory, but then again the english defeated sikhs and kind of "sold" the present day J&K to Gulab Singh for Rs.7,500,000 in around 1846.
In 1947 when India got the independence and the country was partitioned then also there were numerous princely states. All the states were given the option of either accede to India or accede to Pakistan or remain independent. Now this third option annoys me. it means there was no "India"?? I think that this third should not have been there. Most of the princely states decided to join either India or Pakistan according to their choice which was mostly driven by the religious majority in their states. Still J&K and Hyderabad decided to be independent. Hyderabad was annexed to India later and J&K was attacked from the Pakistan side and India bargained the annexation of J&K in return of the security forces to J&K. but still some part of that was captured by Pakistani forces and all that stuff is haunting India till this date.
After all this, it was responsibility of the Indian leaders to work towards national integration in the country but no great efforts came. Even after 62 years, no political party has learned anything. Even today, the day elections are declared, parties start identifying the majority caste/religion in a particular constituency and all the tickets are distributed with only one parameter in mind i.e. caste/religion. And they say that we are contesting a "winnable" candidate. Still people are demanding to cut new states from the existing ones, which have a great potential of further dividing the people. Why to create new state, why to carry more load of the government machinery. there is no reason that a single government could not administrate the complete UP/Bihar/MP or for that matter AP now. Just the intentions should be there. I don't see any need of having more states, the need is to have the correct plans and the honest passion to execute them. It is the responsibility of the leaders to understand what the country needs. there are lot of big problems in the country which needs to be resolved before doing any other thing. We are still not there as a country where we should be after 62 years.
In the last, I agree that nothing earth shattering is happening in the country but still it is time to think and prioritize the needs of the country and build a strong, united INDIA. Where people do not even think of state/region/caste beyond certain limit. Probably that is what they thought, who lost themselves in the quest of independent India.

Sonia or Sania

Read the news of India's tennis sensation Sania Mirza is getting married to Pakistan's tainted former cricket captain Shoaib Malik in April. I read this news on rediff and also read the comments from lot of people on the same forum. Most of the Indians were bashing Sania for her decision of getting Married to this guy. There were some Pakistani people also writing on rediff forum and they were kind of normal to the news. After reading to the news the other person which came into my mind was Sonia Gandhi. Two Indian celebrities, having similar sounding names, doing 180 degree reverse things and getting the same treatment from the people of India. Sonia Gandhi, born in Italy to a common man, marrying to an Indian celebrity but not completely accepted by the nation. On the other hand Sania Mirza, an indian by birth marrying to a pakistani (enemy nation) and rejected by the nation.

There are following two angles from which I thought about whole of this:

1. In both the cases only the female member is rejected by the indian society, either a foreigner female marrying to an indian male or an indian female marrying to a foreigner male. No one bashed Rajiv Gandhi for marrying a foreigner and same is the case with Shoaib also (going by the comments I read from pakistani people on rediff). Although there are some justifiable reasons for this from a common indian's point of view, like India is having sore relationship with Pakistan but not with Italy. So I will leave this angle for some feminist thinker (may be my sister :-) ) and move to my the second angle.

2. I think logically speaking as a nation we can not reject both Sonia Gandhi and Sania Mirza. Sonia left her country for an indian man and Sania is marrying to a person from another country. So there are two completely reverse cases and any logic of abandoning Sonia may serve pretty well to accept Sania and vice versa. My personal view goes with Sonia than Sania. Sonia left her own country came to India and is now an indian citizen. On the other hand Sania is leaving India and is planning to get settled in Dubai with her future husband. Although going by her recent interviews she is not planning to surrender the indian citizenship. But Sania's choice of her life partner is going pretty against her, first of all he is a pakistani, a nation which is involved in so many anti India activities. Secondly who can forget his famous (or rather infamous) statement after Pakistan's loss to India in a cricket match in 2007 saying that its a matter of grief for the muslims all over the world. How, the person who thinks that all the muslims in the whole world should support Pakistan against India, would help Sania to maintain her spirit towards India. Sania said in a recent interview, that in future matches of India and Pakistan she will support India but will also support her husband. Which is pretty contradictory statement and I don't think that it carries any practical relevance. On the other hand Italy had never anything against India so Sonia should not be having any problems in maintaining her commitment to the nation.

I may be wrong in selecting Sonia over Sania, that is just my personal opinion but I am sure about one thing which I mentioned above, "The nation should accept one of them". Its time to think.

This is the classic case of reaching the same point by two completely reverse path. The world is round :-).

God, pain and win

My first attempt on writing.

Few days ago, I read some quote which I don't remember exactly now but the summary of the quote was "If you are in trouble then think yourself as a horse running in the racecourse and god is giving you pain so that you can run fast and win". The first thought which came into my mind after reading this was, whether god doesn't have a better thing to do than having billions of people running in a race and enjoying the pain of people to see who wins the race. I can't disagree more with this thought. this thought is too submissive to god. This shows that we are not responsible for our life at all. Human life is different from other creatures in the way that we have been given more control over our lives than any other species on the earth. Still we want to blame god for anything wrong. I believe in god but, I mean he should be having much better stuff to do than making the world just a racecourse.

Now lets come to the metaphorical terms - "race the life". If you view of your life as a horse race then really what you are going to have is just pain. Because after every race, the winner horse doesn't get anything, all the money is taken away by his master. So, it seems to me that the base comparison is itself wrong. For me, life is not a race at all. Life is calm journey without a destination. Ultimately everyone will reach at only one place and that would be the end of life. And believe me no one would want to reach there first!!. People are remembered for their acts during this journey and not for reaching the finish line here.

The biggest win comes from inside. the first step is to identify what you need from this long journey and what you want to give to others from this. The more you want, more is the effort required and more are the troubles to get that. But those troubles are not which are given by god, those are because you want more. The real win is to get what you set for yourself, which can be of any magnitude. Everyone need not to become Sachin Tendulkar to win. Because every one can not do that. And if everyone could do that then there is no Sachin Tendulkar at all. It is to identify your capabilities and identify your limitation and then decide what you want to get. If you do this step correct then there is going to be less pain and suffering. So most of the part depends on ourselves and not on anyone else.

And signing of with saying that real win (you can term as philosophic win) is not in getting something, it is in giving something. Because that is the real joy.