Friday, December 01, 2023

Facets of India

India has been born and reborn scores of times, and it will be reborn again. India is forever, and India is forever being made. 

The only possible idea of India is that f a nation greater than the sum of its parts. 

India is not, as people keep calling it, an underdeveloped country, but rather, in the context of its history and cultural heritage, a highly developed one in an advanced state of decay. 

One strength of the Indian mind is that it knows some problems cannot be resolved and it learns to make the best of them. That is the Indian answer to the insuperable difficulty. One does not fight against that by which one is certain to be overwhelmed; but one finds the best way for oneself, to live with it.  This is our national aesthetic. Without it, India, as we know it, could not survive. 

India is a thali, a collection of sumptuous dishes n a common platter. Each dish is in a separate bowl and does not necessarily mix with the next, but they belong together and combine on your palate to give you a satisfying repast. 

Indians do well in any situation that calls for an instinctive awareness of the subjectivity of truth, the relativity of judgement and the impossibility of action. 

Does (Non-Resident Indian) stand for Not Really Indian or Never Relinquished Indian? I believe a little of both! Today the NRIs are the National Reserve of India. 

Bureaucracy is simultaneously the most crippling of Indian diseases and the highest of Indian art forms. 

We Indians are notoriously good at being resigned to our lot. Our fatalism goes beyond, even if it springs from, the Hindu acceptance of the wold as it is ordained to be. 

Pluralist India must, by definition, tolerate plural expressions of its many identities. 

In India we celebrate the commonality of major differences; we are a land of belonging rather than of blood. 

We all have multiple identities in India; we are all minorities in India. Our heterogeneity is definitional.

Our founding fathers wrote a constitution for their dream. We have given passports to their ideals. 

Democracy is not just elections every five years, but what happens between them. 

Life is a series of sequels to history. 


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