Why We Should Dream
Again..…Now?
Is India trying to
dream today? A society, after centuries of indecision and wavering, is it trying
to rise and do what its people haven’t done, in rising above being a slave?
Why should Indians
dream again now? Because ‘to dream’ that is part of evolution of every society,
was snatched away and died a million deaths due to invasions and colonialism. A
trait that had died, unseen and unheard and never written down. Every invasion,
every temple that was brought down, killed the civilization little by little
till nothing was left including the hope to do so again.
Every leader in
history, every prophet who had to raise his people from ignorance, had to first
teach them to dream again. Martin Luther King began his speech with ‘I have a
dream’ fifty years ago. He taught his people that to rise from slavery one has
to be aware to dream again, one that percolated down to the very common man.
Going to America was
once the ‘American dream’. Millions of people, Indians included, went for it. That
dream meant not just creating wealth, but even learning in its universities, or
even running away from persecuting ideologies.
Once India represented
that dream. Thousands came here to study in universities, to trade and become
rich. People even came here to escape religious persecution. What we symbolized
was tolerance and the highest that any civilization represents. Are Indians capable
of creating that again?
Today, there are
two Indias, one the rising one, an India which wants to dream and go ahead and
the other India that is still confused and lives in chains. How do we separate
the two and understand the men who represent both these realties?
The man who
collects garbage from my home every morning is a young man and illiterate. Except
for taking the garbage he never talks or even looks at me. Two weeks ago
something changed. He looked at me in the eye and told me he is going to take a
leave on 8th February. Gone was the shyness I was used to in him. His
voice had a strange determination. A similar thing I heard from my car cleaner.
He said he won’t come on 8th. They had never taken leave and
announced it like this. Why now?
“My moulavi saheb
ordered us to defeat Modi,” he said on the day after voting, “every musalman in
my area went for that.”
“What has he done
to you?” I asked.
“I don’t know. Our
moulavi saheb told us.”
What I understood
from both of them was that the average Muslim is an angry Muslim. He is not saying
it openly but hiding it after the abrogation of article 370 and abolition of triple
talaq, the judgement of Ram janma bhumi and the passing of CAA. He feels humiliated.
Is this thinking his own? The answer is a big ‘no’ like always.
In contrast, what
does the average Hindu feel about the drastic changes? He is defensive,
confused and doesn’t know how to go ahead. He is not speaking up believing it
is too unreal. Why hasn’t he begun to speak up for himself? The answer lies in
the historical trauma that stops him every time.
So, here we have a
leadership which is trying to make his people dream again. Whether article 370,
triple talaq, Ram janma bhumi, they represent a full spectrum of a society trying
to come to terms with its past and undo injustices and historical wrongs.
We have a leader trying
to lay a new foundation. Then why is he abused, vilified and reviled like no
other in history? The answer lies in the nature of the relationship between a visionary
leader and his people who he is taking on a path less travelled. How do we
understand this tumultuous relationship?
For my first patient,
Anupam (name changed), I, a young psychologist, had poured my heart and soul in
his recovery. I believed in him everyone else having given up on him. As he began
to get better, he began to call me names and abuse me. What had I done to
deserve that from him, I wondered? I had only asked him to work hard, take responsibility
and remove his self limiting beliefs. And then I understood why. My professor
told me, “You are trying to change his beliefs. You have touched a raw chord in
him when no one else did for years. It has led him to direct all his wrath at you,”
she had explained.
When Narendra Modi
talks of India with so much passion that his voice shakes every time, in doing
so does he also not show us a mirror where we stand even though he doesn’t say
so? He disturbs us by telling us our old ways won’t work. That the path to
change them is sacrificial and our self limiting beliefs must go. He hurts us
at the very core by saying that we must make sacrifices. His steely resolve and
determination is unknown to Indians who expect a status quo. The deepest buried
hurts, vulnerabilities and fears of ours are out in the open, raw and with no place
to hide.
In 1947, when India
became independent, the Indian people needed a leadership who could help them to
let go of a thousand year of humiliation, of grief to start again anew. The feelings
of slavery had to dissolve in that period of transition but in my view increased
many folds. We carried forward our chains that bind us till today.
Every society has needed
a father figure at times of transition to lead it on a path to autonomy and freedom.
Indians didn’t have any one with that qualities after independence. The narratives
developed after independence by court historians didn’t let us see any in the
ones who could have been that for us, whether it was in Shivaji, Maharana
Pratap or Guru Gobind Singh. Passivity and doing nothing became the norm, one
that took away our power to bring in and absorb change.
So, today change
that comes, seems too sudden and scary. It looks perplexing and disturbs us. Indians
are not used to changes that gives them back justice denied to them and makes
them look at themselves with self respect. To fill up that gap, we need to
create a leadership within that is a secure base, comforts us and comes from
that infinite wisdom that is left behind by our ancestors. There is a healing space
in the land that is India that is deep, calm and tranquil.
Change as we know
is never smooth and historical changes that undoes injustice even less so. The psychologist
Virginia Satir used to say ‘order – disorder – reorder’ to explain how we change
after long periods of passivity, add slavery. “Between order and reorder,” she used
to say, “there is a stage marked by chaos and uncertainty.” We have Geeta, Upnishads
left by our ancestors today to guide us through that phase, the finest healing treatises
in mankind on how to go through that change.
India today stands
at a crossroad. We are making a leap from being a society with a ‘slave mindset’
into the future where we want to live ‘without fear and our heads held high’ in
the words of Tagore. The fear we see around is not of going into the unknown
but letting go of the known. There are two Indias today before us, one India
that wants to live with courage and hope, to excel through hard work and the
other which wants to live on freebies and corruption. Who will decide on the
new India? I believe the answer is for all of us to see.
We have begun to
dream again!
Rajat Mitra
Psychologist,
Speaker and Author of ‘The Infidel Next Door’
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