The Brave Pedestrian

We of the modern mechanistic civilization seek to define all things and phenomena as ‘it’, as against he or she. We objectify (as against personify) the world when we refer to it as ‘it’, and not he or she. By contrast, we personify our country as ‘she’, ‘Bharat Mata’ etc. Some decades earlier, when people referred to India as  Bharat Mata , they meant it literally. Those who participated in the freedom struggle were inspired by the feeling that they were risking their lives for an entity that mattered a lot more than ordinary mortals, and yet was intimately connected to them and their families. Today, we don’t think that way. We think of India as ‘it’. India is beautiful as long as the the GDP, forex reserves and Sensex look sexy, and as long as the world is cheering it lustily as the new, rising BRIC nation. We don’t love India the way we loved  Bharat Mata. I think objectifying impoverishes us. Objectifying is fine when you’re dealing with micro-realities a...

August 7, 2009: My 13-year-old daughter had a nasty spat with a schoolmate today. Coming home in a bad mood with bite marks on her arm, she changed into her home clothes, and headed for her room, her computer, her personal space on the internet… her blog. Then my wife said something about the exams and told her not to waste her time, and got some kind of angry retort. Offended by the “attitude”, my wife switched off the computer, wiping out a few paragraphs of rant on the blog, and triggering an episode of tearful rage. I heard the shouting match and intervened. All the manuals on parenting advise that at such times, parents must pull together in disciplining the kid. But there’s one problem: I identify more with my daughter and her concerns about privacy and freedom, than I do with my wife and her concerns about propriety and discipline. And so my daughter and I had another one of those long, rambling father-daughter talks that we seem to have every six months or so. Much of w...