Residual Indian-ness

Last night, as I lay in my bed, I struggled to sleep. Not because I was worried or tensed, But because I hadn’t worked enough that day. All I did was sit on the couch and watched a lot of movies. Well anyway, as I struggled to sleep, I received a text message. I was astonished and wondered who it could be at this time in the night. It happened to be from a British friend. The message read “Hey, congratulations ! The republic of India has completed sixty years this year and I’m sure you take pride in it... “. I was pleasantly surprised with this considering that he wasn’t even remotely associated to India. As of today the most common threads connecting Britishers to India are, either their relatives and their future generations who have lived in India since the colonial times (Well, what can I say ! India and Indians can entice people) or the people who grossly misinterpreted “The monk who sold his Ferrari” think that “moksha”/salvation comes from becoming a vegetarian and metaphorically “selling off their Ferraris” and moving into a cave in the HIMALAYAS (Well what can I say ! A lot of people got rid of their Ferraris after Robin Sharma suggested). So anyway, he wished me and I thanked him and felt so small that I didn’t know when the British republic came into being. My phone lit up again and there was another message. “Hey Janhavi, Happy Independence Day !! Our India is free from all the British”. Needless to say, I really struggled very hard to sleep that night. The boy, an Indian, from my generation, born and brought up next to my home for 15 years was just as Indian as I am. He stood next to me and sang the Indian National anthem with me through school with just as much as pride as I did. Disgust doesn’t even begin to express what I felt towards him. Then again, it got me thinking. Indians probably have portrayed themselves just the way the foreigners perceived it fifty years ago. A great deal of news that filters through Indian borders to the other side, is not really very well thought about. India has automatically become synonymous with, A.R.Rahman, Amitabh Bachchan, Slumdog Millionaire, Poverty, filth, Corruption, Malnourished kids, Kashmir Issues, unfair caste systems, Tiger on the brink of extinction...
Crisply put, all the things that India shouldn’t be known for ! Does that mean that there are no beggars in America ? Or is there no corruption in England ? Or that in no other part of the world has any other animal faces the fear of being extinct ?
What Indians themselves, forget about their own country is that we’re the largest democracy in the world, currently in the league to be a super power in mere twenty years. We have at least a thousand different cultures thriving in the country and 2000 different dialects. The constitution of the country was written by a man who belonged to the lowest possible caste and that the standard of living has increased drastically in the last decade. Walk into a mall anywhere in the world and you’ll definitely find at least one Indian shopping there. Well yes there is filth and yes there is poverty and there are issues with neighbours. But if that was the reason to judge anyone, probably the world would be full of obsessively clean freakishly nice saints.
All I want to say through this, is whether you want to see the glass half full or the glass half empty (in India’s case) is your problem, but you may as well tell everyone else that “India’s glass is almost full, and about to overflow”