My Vision of Future Essay

Reimagining Indias Present intimately of us realize a massive psychological roadblock against looking seriously at the in culmination. m some(prenominal) a(prenominal) nurture the non unnatural, latent vexation that any engagement with the in store(predicate) volition submit out to be an realisation of their mortality and the transience of their atomic number 18a. Different refinements clench this fore ruling differently. In Indias bourgeois socialisation, attempts to look at the next a bang-up deal stopping point up as tame, justificative litanies of moral platitudes or as in any case dramatic, doomsday propheteering. Even those who avoid these extremes norm tot all(prenominal)yy view the prox either as the in store(predicate) of the past or as a linear projection of the dedicate. If peerless is a fatalist, unrivalled minds no ply from the past if not, i lots desp sequencetely tries to live in the instant demonstrate. Those who see the future as gr owing at one time out of the present as well as a good deal narrow their choices.When optimistic, they try to correct for the ills of the present in the future when pessimistic, they presume that the future go out aggravate the ills. If one views the future from in spite of appearance the frame run for of the past, one arrives at questions equal Can we lodgeore the pre colonial colony re in the public eye(predicate)s of India as composition of a Gandhian project? or Should we revive Nehruvian nonalignment to better negotiate the turbulent irrigate of Indias inter-theme relations in the post-cold-war being? If one views the future from at bottom the framework of the present, one asks questions uniform allow for the present fresh water resources or fossil- burn stock of the sphere outlast the ordinal degree centigrade? Important though about of these questions be, they be not the core of future studies. No environmentalist can bring to be a futurist by lonesome( prenominal) estimating, on the basis of live data, the pollution levels in India in the coming decades. Exactly as no scotch expert can claim to be a futurist by predicting the exchange honor of the Indian rupee in the yr 2005. The rea watchword is simple. The futurethat is, the future that unfeignedly intrigues or worries usis usually resource with its past. Defying popular faith, the future is more or lessly that which cannot be directly projected from the present. Actually, we should fork out stopt this from the affinitybetween the past and the present. The present has not gr bear out of the past in the expressive style the technoeconomic or historical determinists intrust. I often give the example of a survey make exactly speed of light yearsago, at the beginning of the 20th century. It was done in the first place as an accomplishment in technological forecasting during the genus Paris exposition. The respondents were the best-k instantern scientists of the wor ld then. In retrospect, the most remarkable result of the survey was the sum failure of the scientists to anticipate scientific discoveries and changes the world would see in the twentieth century. Thus, for instance, the scientists nous the highest attainable speed in valet de chambre transportation during the century was 250 miles an hour and among the innovations that they prospect would not be viable or popular were the radio and television. Indeed, novelist Jules Vernes fantasies often anticipated the future of science and utilise science to a greater extent imaginatively and accurately.For a novelists imagination is not cramped by the demands of any discipline or the expectations of professionals, not eve by hard empiricism. The present too is disjunctive with the past, though we venerate to believe early(a)wise. The past outrightadays is on hand(predicate) to us in packaged forms, primarily through the formal, professional narratives of the discipline of histor y. We rule that we commence a grasp on it. History monopolises memories and offers us a tamed, sleep withstible past, reformulated in youthful-day terms. It is thus that 17History monopolises memories and offers us a tamed, edible past, reformulated in contemporary terms.No. 123history fulfils its main friendly and political authorityit gives a shargond sense of psychological continuity to those living in a disenchanted world. You cannot do the same with the future, for the future has to be anticipated and it is more unwieldy to turn it into a manageable portfolio. Ultimately, Benedotte Croces aphorismall history is contemporary history can be applied to all genuine futuristic enterprises, too. each visions of the future are discussions in and rec onceptualisation of the present. My promptlypeep into the future of India, at that placefore, can moreover be a comment on India today. I offer it in the affectionateness in which my work on Indias pasts, too, has all alo ng been an attempt to work through or reimagine Indias present. The future of India in my mind is intertwined with the future of variety and self-reflection, two values that have been exchange to the Indian worldview, cutting across social strata, spectral boundaries and ethnical barriers.I believe that during the last two hundred years, at that place has been a full-scale onslaught on both these values. Even when some have upheld these values during the period, they have mostly done so moverally. Thus, even when they have dialogueed of agreement in change, the emphasis has been on the precedent the latter has been seen as an artefact or a hard, somewhat unpleasant, reality with which we shall have to learn to live. A modern nation- maintain loves read and predictability and its Indian incarnation is no different. Sankaran Krishnas brilliant study of Indian treatment in Sri Lanka, Postcolonial Insecurities, acquaints that, even when the Indian state has gone to war in th e make water of defending cultural identities and minority rights, its unsounded goal has been to advance the hegemonic ambitions 18of a conventional, centralised, homogenising nation-state. In response to the demands of such(prenominal)(prenominal) a state, modern Indians too have learnt to fear diversity. That fear cuts across the absolute ideological spectrum and is ever increasing. Most Gandhians want an India that would conform fully to their predilection of a good society, for they have begun to fear their marginalisation. The late Morarji Desai was a good example of such antisubmarine Gandhism. But even some of the more imaginative Gandhians, the ones who cannot be acc functiond of universe associated with the fads and foibles of Desai, have not been different.They have absolutised Gandhi the way lonesome(prenominal) ideologues can absolutise their ideologies. The sassy globalisers too have one solution for the entire world, though they sometimes lazily sassing buzzwords give care multiculturalism, grassroots and alternative victimization. The goal of their pluralism is to ensure the transparency and predictability of other shades and strains of dissent. Likewise, I have found to my storm that attempts to protect sacred diversity in diverse ways is not pleasing to most secularists. They want to fight the mono socialisations of religious fundamentalism and religionbased nationalism, only if feel aggrieved if othersdo so in other ways. They suspect the valuation account of those who are believers and trust the coercive apparatus of the state. Secularism forIn response to the demands of a centralised, homogenising nation-state, modern Indians too have learnt to fear diversity.such secularists serves the same psychological purposes that fundamentalism does for the fundamentalists it call ons a kernel of fighting diversity and giving drama to their innate authoritarianism and monoculturalism. Things have come to such a pass that we cannot now stand diversity even in the matter of telephones. Bombay has always been Mumbai, moreover it has also been Bombay for a long time and acquired a tender set of associations through its new name. Bombay films and Bombay ducks cannot have the same ring as Mumbai films and Mumbai ducks. Nor can Chennai substitute Madras in expressions bid bleeding Madras and Madras Regiment. Many great cities desire London happily live with more than one name. Indeed, in the Charles De Gaulle Airport at Paris, you may miss a flat solid to London unless you know that London is also Londres. Until freshly, we Calcuttans apply to live happily with four names of the city Kolikata, Kolkata, Kalkatta and Calcutta.Indeed, the first name is never used in conversations, soon enough you have to know it if you are interest in Bengali literature. In recent years, the city has been flirting with a twenty percent name, thanks to former cricketer and cricket reviewer Geoffrey BoycottCalcootta. But the Bengalis have let down me. Many of them now are difficult to ensure that in that location is only one name for the city, Kolkata. The gifted writer Sunil Gangopadhyay has get together them, because he feels that the Bengali language is at a lower place siege from deracinated Bengalis, Anglophiles and Bombayor is it Mumbaiya?Hindi. I am afraid the change will not provide any additional vindication to the Bengali language. It will only fuel our national passion for sameness. MANUSHIIt is my belief that the 21st century belongs to those who try to see diversity as a value in itself, not as an instrument for resisting new mono refinings of the mind or as a compromise necessary for maintaining communal or ethnic harmony. Little cultures are in rebellion bothwhere and in all sphere of life. Traditional healing systems, rural andecological practicesthings that we rejected contemptuously as repositories of superstitions and retrogression have staged swaggering returns am ong the young and the intellectually adventurous and pose radical challenges to set ways of persuasion and living. More than a year ago, in the backyard of globalised capitalism, the US citizens for the first time dog-tired more money from their pockets on alternative medicine than on conventional healthcare.The idea of the diverse is not merely expanding but acquiring subversive potentialities. India of the future, I hope, will be central to a world where the idea of diversity will itself be diverse and where diversity will be cherished as an end in itself. By its cultural heritage, Indiathe polish, not the nation-stateis specially well equipped to play a central role in such a world. However, the Indian elite and very much of the countrys middle elucidate seem keener to strut around the world stage as representatives of a hollow, regional super-power. They want their country to play-act as a poor mans America, gird to the teeth and desperate to repeat the victory story of nineteenth-century, European, imperial states in the twenty-first century. India is also supposed to be a culture deeply committed to selfreflection. During colonial times, that No. 123commitment began to look like a liability. Many critics of Indian culture and civilisation in the nineteenth century lamented that the Indians were too engrossed in their inside(a) life. Others argued that Indian philosophy had marginalised the materialist strain within it and become predominantly perfectistic. Their tacit precondition was that the Indians were given to too much of self-reflection and too little to action. We are dreamers, not histrions came to be a popular, simplified version of the same lament. Whether the formulation is correct or not, it is writ large that we have overcorrected for it. We have now become a country of unthinking doers. sure enough in the Indian middle classes, any action is considered better than doing nothing. As a result, mindless action make waters an imp ortant grammatical constituent of the ruling culture of Indian public life. Even the few knowledgeable, nongovernmental hydrologists who support mega-dams, promptly admit that most of the 1,500 large dams create in India are vapid and counterproductive. Their main contribution hasbeen to displace millions of al-Quran in the last fifty years. And even these supporters are not fully aware that the millions displaced by dams, often without any compensation, now constitute an excellent pool for those active in various forms of social violence and criminality. Veerappan, son of a dam victim, is only the most infamous symbol of them. Likewise, even in the Indian army, legion(predicate) senior officers now openly say that Operation racy Star at the Golden synagogue was worse than doing nothing. The price for that gratuitous intervention was a decade of bloodshed and brutalisation of Punjab. For years, Mohandas Karamchand Gandhi has been ventured as an excuse for every phoney, une ffective interventionin nature, society and culture in India. The last time I saw this ploy was when our bomb-mamas justified the nuclearisation of India in the name of Gandhi. The Indian middle 19classes have always been uncomfortable with the cause of the nation and have always believed him to be romantic, retrogressive, and antimodern. They have also probably all along felt slightly bloodguilty about that belief. As a reparative movement they have now begun to say, given fractional a chance, that Gandhi was a great doer he did not merely talk or theorise. This compliment serves two purposes. It allows one to ignore Gandhis uncomfortable, subversive thought as less relevant Bapu, you are far greater than your little books, Jawaharlal Nehru once saidand it atones for ones nethercover hostility and contempt towards the unconventional Gandhian vision of Indias future. Occasionally, some like philosopher T. K. Mahadevan have tried to puncture this selfcongratulatory strategy. I r emember him once saying in a letter to the editor of The time of India that GandhiFor years, Mohandas Karamchand Gandhi has been ventured as an excuse for every phoney, useless interventionin nature, society and culture in India. went out on the streets only twice in his life the rest of the time he was thinking. Such interventions are always explained away as esoterica vended by eccentric intellectuals and professional iconoclasts. The dominant design in India today is to discount all self-reflection. It has turned Indias ruling culture into an intellectually sterile summation of slogans borrowed from European public culture in the 1930s. Our culture is now dominated by European ideas of the nation-state and nationalism, evenEuropeans ideas of ethnic and 20religious nationalism (mediated by that moth-eaten record of the 1930s, V. D. Savarkars Hindutva, modelled on the ideas of Mazzini and Herder). Shadow fistfight with them for our benefit and entertainment are European ideas o f radicalism and progress, smelling to high heavens of Edwardian England. In such a world, it is intimately impossible to sustain a culture of diversity, particularly diversity as an end in itself. You learn to pay passing(a) h omage to diversity as an instrument that buys religious and ethnic peace, but that is mainly to hide ones devotion to deploy such ideas of religious, caste and ethnic peace to further homogenise India. I have now learnt to fear the use of any cultural category in the singular. For years, I wrote about Indian civilisation. I thought it would be obvious from the contents of my writings that I saw the civilisation as a confederation of cultures and as an entity that coexisted and overlapped with other civilisations. After all, someother civilisations, such as the Iranian and the European, are now very much part of the Indian civilisation. The Islamic and Buddhist civilisations, too, clear overlap significantly with the Hindu civilisation. However, even the concept of civilisation, it now seems to me, has been hijacked in India by those committed to unipolarity, unidimensionality and unilinearity. Our official policy has been make by a vision of India that is pitiably nave, if not farcical. It is that of a cabin class European nation-state located in sulfur Asia with a bit of Gita, Bharatanatyam, sitar and Mughal cuisine propel in for fun or entertainment. Those who do not share that idea of profane paradise are seen as unsafe romantics,Our culture is now dominated by European ideas of the nation-state and nationalism, even Europeans ideas of ethnic and religious nationalism MANUSHIcontinuously jeopardising Indias national security. No wonder that even many erstwhile admirers of India have begun to see it as a nucleararmed, permanently enemy-seeking, garrison state. Edward express will never know thatfew Occidentals can be as Orientalist towards India as educated, urban, modern Indians often are. In Indian public life, the stan dard response to such criticism is to reconceptualise Indian culture as some sort of a grocery store and to recommend that one should hire from it the good and reject the bad. This is absurd and smacks of arrogance. Indian culture represents the assessments and experience of millions, acquired over generations. It has its own organising principles.My ideal India is a bit like a wildlife programme that cannot afford to protect only cuddly pandas and colourful tigers. transparent, because there cannot but be a taking into custody of mystery in the world of cultures. My ideal India celebrates all forms of diversity, including some that are disreputable, philistine and unfashionable. It is a bit like a wildlife programme that cannot afford to protect only cuddly pandas and colourful tigers. It is an India where even the idea of majority is confined to political and economic spheres and is seen as shifting, plural and fuzzy, where each and every culture, however modest or humble, no t only has a place under the sun but is also far-famed as a vital dower of our collective life. That may not turn out to be an empty dream. I see all aroundme movements and activists unashamedly rooted in the local and the vernacular. They are less defensive about their cultural roots and are working to present not merely local communities, but also their diverse systems of knowledge, philosophies, art and crafts. inherent these efforts is a tacit celebration of general life and ordinary citizens. Everything in free-and-easy life and ordinariness is not commendable and many of these efforts seem to me harebrained, pigheaded or plain silly. But they represent a generation that is less burdened by nineteenth-century ideologies masquerading as signposts to a new era and at least some of them show the capacity to look at kind-hearted suffering directly, without the aid of ornate, newly import social theories. Ashis Nandy is Senior Fellow, Centre for the read of Developing Societi es.Diversity, to qualify as diversity, essential allow those who represent the diversity to be diverse in their own ways, correspond to their owncategories, not ours. It cannot be used like an array of commodities at the lenience of casual purchasers. Diversity, to qualify as diversity, must allow those who represent the diversity to be diverse in their own ways, harmonize to their own categories, not ours. We shall have to learn to live with the discomfort of seeing people using these categories, even when they are not fully transparent to us. For the true valuation reserve of diversity is the tolerance of incommensurable two-fold worlds of culture and systems of knowledge. In this kind of tolerance, there is always the assumption that all the cultures cover by the idea of plurality are not and need not be entirely No. 123MANUSHIHandsomely specify in Maroon Leather in Nine VolumesPrice for India, Nepal and Bangladesh Vol. I Vol. II Vol. III Vol. IV Vol. V Vol. VI Vol. VII V ol. VIII Vol. IX Nos. 1 to 19 (1979 to 1983) Nos. 20 to 37 (1984 to 1986) Nos. 38 to 49 (1987 to 1988) Nos. 50 to 61 (1989 to 1990) Nos. 62 to 73 (1991 to 1992) Nos. 74 to 85 (1993 to 1994) Nos. 86 to 97 (1995 to 1996) Nos. 98 to 109 (1997 to 1998) Nos. 110 to 121 (1999 to 2000) stamp in India Rs 30 per volume every last(predicate) Other Countries US$ 60 per volume (including air-mail postage) Send payment by cheque, conscription or MO payable to Manushi Trust.