In our dreams...

60 long years ago, our leaders promised us a tryst with destiny and announced we had promises to keep and miles to go. Well, I don't know whether Robert Frost managed to do what he set out to do in his poem but we definitely haven't!
We promised ourselves a secular nation - free of bias, prejudice, communal divisions, religious confrontations and so on and so forth.
So, at the expense of beating a much beaten drum and flogging a very dead horse, we are no further on than our forefathers were decades ago... Yes, yes, I know! We are India Shining. So what? Scratch the surface of all that shine and bling and what do you find?
The same racial divides, the same tired and nasty old attitudes...
A few examples...
Domestic help should not sit on chairs in front of their employers. They should have separate utensils to eat from. Their food is carefully parcelled out. and on occasion they are beaten, raped, abused and trodden underfoot.

Brahmins to marry Brahmins. Every caste to stay in its own place - and as for the STs and SCs and the OBCs - for them as long as we have quotas, we can treat them like dirt. Fair and homely girls are still the only kind that sons should marry and the Green Card is the gateway to the promised land.

Farmers are committing suicide by the hundreds. No one seems to care... But why are they dying? Because they and their families are starving to death but then so what? The tribals are dying. The pavement dwellers are dying. Little children are dying, woman are being burnt to death, beaten up and thrown out... in a country of one billion plus, who is going to notice the deaths of even thousands?

Let's look at urban India.Foreign woman "goris" are getting raped and molested with impunity. Why? Because they are considered 'white' chicks and fair game. Bachelors, single women (even though they are above 50!), Muslims, blacks, non-vegetarians (in Chennai) and probably a whole host of others, are denied a place to stay.Women still face a glass ceiling at work and men refuse to discuss business matters with them down South. How secular is that?

We are so fixated about our so-called ethnic pasts that we re-christen cities that didn't even exist before the Brits - there was NO Mumbai or Kolkata or Chennai before the Brits. So where do these names come from? Are we trying to re-write our own history and trying to wipe out 200 years of our existence?

Last, but not least, why should North Indians be kept out of Maharashtra? Anyone with basic knowledge of history will know that before Maharashtra became a linguistic state it consisted of large tracts of Gujarat, and Mumbai itself had more people from other parts of India than from Maharashtra itself. Why should Bengal be only for Bengalis and Punjab for Punjabis?

It's amazing what our politicians will do to win votes. They will stand our constitution on its head with impunity. Who cares about all the principles, ideals and ethics that India was founded upon? We are supposed to be ONE united nation. But are we? Deep down in our hearts? Or are we just a fractured entity being pulled apart by a million vested interests? How does it matter if in the process of dividing to rule, our country goes back to being a hundred little fiefdoms fighting for survival. What price India Shining?