The Importance of being Ordinary

It begins at infancy - the great Indian quest for becoming a Sahib. Happened with me too.

बेटा IIT वगैरह सब अपने जगह पर हैं. IAS का पॉवर ही कुच्छ और है. IAS बनो तुम। (Son, IIT is good but not great. The power enjoyed by IAS officers is in a different league. Be an IAS officer.)

You grow up seeing Sahibism prevalent everywhere. The classmate who smokes at the age of 12 is expelled but the expulsion is rescinded because his mother is the local MLA; indentities are pulled out at the drop of a pin - "you don't know me. I am the son of XYZ, or I am the Chief Inspector at CBI, or I am the friend of local Head Constable". All euphemisms for, "my lot is better than yours, I am superior. Therefore, I derive preference over you - whether it is to skip the queue at the doctor's clinic at the local hospital, or to get my son admission into the presstigious public school, or to be ahead of you in the VIP queue at Tirupati".

Is this my India? The challenges in fulfilling citizenship duties...

The workings of our governing institutions seem to want to divorce us for from our ownership of our country. Why is it okay in a democracy to be told "this is not your business"? Is this the country that Gandhi, Nehru or Ambedkar envisioned? Is it even the India that we deserve? Can we change this? How?

August - perhaps late August. Exhausted from a series of meetings, I am relaxing at a Coffee Day adjacent one of the gleaming new business towers in Jasola just behind Apollo Indraprashta, New Delhi. I step outside the coffee shop to go to a toilet that is located in the business tower. The guard salaams me as I enter the business tower, just as I notice a man with a naked gun and a belt displaying an array of bullets entering the Coffee Day shop.