chanakyaa wrote:
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KLMN and Suraj-san, those were some quality posts. It is easy to get carried away by what appears on the surface by news headlines. Having a majority government is one thing, but the task of pushing bold agenda while dealing with all the constraints in spite of a majority is something else.
Thanks for the compliment. I accept not with humility but with pride, since I respect BRF's caliber.
On those lines, some thoughts for the non-existent Modi-magic thread that I never got around to starting:
If we take Modi as a representative of India's "native" political genius, does such a thing (native political genius) exist in any meaningful and realistic sense, and if so, what does it look like?
In the stereotypical white man's view, the native Indian is a kind of repulsive ignorant savage--give him a computer and he will use it to warm his hands, give him an electoral democracy and he will create caste- or religion-based vote banks, give him a Supreme Court and he will turn it into a glorified government office that "takes up" any and every case, with the judges exhibiting the caliber of simultaneously servile and pompous upper division clerks who write tedious "notations" on files in babu-english.
These depictions are unfair and hurtful. They are unfair and also wrong because clearly they tell only a small facet of the story, one blind man's idea of the elephant. So, we either dismiss them, or just internalize the hurt to build up resentment and anger against the white man for his usual game of undermining India. All valid and proper responses.
But they are also, in a literal sense, observable phenomena, albeit of limited validity (blind man & elephant as above). The white eyes are not actually lying, though they are not really telling the truth. And mostly, we see those non-lies as unflattering and humiliating.
But maybe in the pragmatic eyes of a native Modi, these non-lies are neither flattering nor humiliating, but merely a slice of reality in the real universe that is India, constructive and effective responses to almost-intractable problems that might break a different nation than one that is peopled by native Indians.
The first (using a computer to warm hands) is a jokey & contrived example, but I have in fact used my laptop for that purpose many a time, when turning on the house heater would be overkill and unnecessarily expensive.
The second--vote banks, is quite likely instrumental in avoiding the fate that the white man predicted for us in 1947, namely that we will fall apart bloodily. (Even the despised Muslim vote bank probably held at bay the powerful disruptive forces unleashed by Partition.)
The third, the weird and embarrassing way in which the Supreme Court functions we have already touched upon. We are using it as a Supreme Court yes, but also as a kind of deflecting shield cum cooling rod cum overflow channel for the system.
The common thread is a high-flying, high-risk tightrope act of continuous innovative adaptation or jugaad. Like the American TV show MacGyver. Like one of those tests in job interviews where you are expected to do unexpected, "out of the box" things to solve problems with the items you are given. Or like the Engineer Scotty in the old Star Trek series, somehow keeping the Enterprise flying despite all odds, and all the impossible unexpected challenges and demands placed on the ship.
This is not the most efficient--in terms of energy and resources--way to manage things, let alone something architecturally and esthetically pleasing to see. And there are long-term prices to pay in all of these--vote banks, weird use of Supreme Court, and any of a number of other things.
But how can we not admire, respect and love a poor nation of 1.4 B people who have been oppressed and repressed slaves for a millennium, who got thrown into the Starship Enterprise that is the complex 21st Century world, and whose native genius still manages to keep it flying, mostly where they want it to go, with the crew mostly having the chance to develop and grow in their own right?
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