DISCLAIMER: This is an extremely random blog with no structure or goal in sight. This is what I do best.
We Marathi people have been absorbing and accomadating, over the years, the beauty and culture of several states in India. The Marathi manoos have playedan important role as the standing example for unifying the extreme diversity found in India. Maharshtra has seen the influx of many populations over the history of its existence. the British, Portuguese, the Islamic invaders have all played an important role in shaping the heritage of this great state.
From Mumbai to Nagpur, from Nashik to Jalgaon, you can see the immense diversity in this wondeful state.
We are a gentle population and have rarely tried exerting our own culture over other in the country. However, in the recent decade or so, troubling incidents have taken place which shows challenges faced by the Marathi culture in Maharshtra herself.
Sure, the influence of outsiders in Maharshtra has been quite big. but that is not the most distressing signal that should be noticed. Outsiders bring their culture to our state, and preserve it amongst themselves and take pride in it. What we should be worried about is Marathi people losing touch of their own heritage. What we should be worried out, is insiders and not outsiders.
A whole generation of Mumbaikars has been spawned which will never feel connected to Mumbai or Maharashtra, even for one day of their life.
Finding excuses and reasons to detach yourself from the land which raised you, has become disturbingly easy. In this bastion of Indian Marathi pride, the moats are drying up and the towers are collapsing not because people are trying to get inside the fort, but because people are trying to break out.
When Raj Thackerey made a fuss about having hoardings in Marathi, people were strikingly quick to call it an extremist view in a metropolitan city. No one gave a second thought to why there weren't hoardings in the language. No one really cared about the mass neglect of the language that defined the land. Where is the pride in our language, I wonder, where has the pride gone and why has the word ghati become such an abusive and hateful comment?
Learning English is really important to survive in a world where borders are blurring at an accelerated pace. But, at the same time learning the language of the land you live in keeps you grounded and puts globalization in a much more relatable scale. It's kind of like much used and abused tree example. Without your roots deep,steady and well-spread in the ground, you can never grow tall and wide and expand yourself in this world. And, every day I spend a minute of my day wondering why, in India of all countries, staying true to your roots is becoming a challenge. No other country in the world has the wealth of languages we have, and yet our pride rests in the one language that we picked up from our invaders.
To put things into perspective, Balasaheb Thackerey generated a deep sense of love for Marathi, Maharashtra and Mumbai in my Mom, who had lived for two decades since her birth in Karnataka. She did not even have the luxury of birth in this Marathi land, which is being extremely undervalued these days. On the other hand, it is extremely visible that the generation below me has alread moved on and have chosen, at an extremely young age, to disgregard the place of their birth.
At this point I can see many of you shaking your heads and calling the Thackereys hate mongers. However, I guarantee you that the day the Thackereys have no power in Maharashtra, our state will no longer have its own identity. These are extreme and violent steps taken by a group of people that defame the other wise extremely important changes the Thackreys have pushed into this state. Mithibai college has a Gujurati quota. Xaviers has a Christian quota. SIES has a south Indian quota. How come no Marathi college in Maharshtra has a Marathi quota? Balasaheb Thackerey had tried his best to get this thing set up. Why is the Marathi ideal so undervalued these days? Marathi cinema and theatre has talent that is extremely difficult to find anywhere in the country. However, with a few exceptions, Marathi movies have been under explored and unappreciated by the masses. Raj Thackerey's efforts to make every hoarding in Mumbai have a Marathi translation as well, I think should have worked wonders. It would have been a small yet important step in the propagation of this language. To every one who complains why this is necessary in a place like Mumbai, please visit Bangalore, Chennai and Delhi and come back and we will have another discussion.
Recently we witnessed the unfortunate passing away of Balasaheb Thackerey. And the only reason that two million people showed up without any bribe of money,biryani or alcohol was testatement to the efforts of the man to bring together an entire community. No man in recent history has commanded this much respect. During the silence, two million people stood quietly and people should take some time to think why this was possible.
But many other people have tried emphasizing the need for revival of Maharashtrian values.
So why is this transition happening?
But, here is my opinion on why so very few people actually go out into this world and start helping people and making a difference which actually makes a difference. You can never start helping the world if you don't love your own house. There is great sense in the proverb 'charity begins at home'. If you want to save trees in the Amazon, first plant a little plant in your own backyard, take care of it and help it grow into a flowring wonder. If you want to help the hungry orphans in Africa, take a stroll down the slums of Sion, you will see many kids who need your help. You do not even need to go that far, take care of people in your own home first. And we all do that, sub-concsiously- we take care of people in our house first. If two babies playing in the sun start crying because of thirst, the mother watching them will always give water first to her baby. And this is not being selfish.
It is a process.
But here is where we rationalize every thing to suit our own needs. Our process stops working when it comes to our own mother state.
We can never love the entire world, as so many "global" youths today claim, if we dont love our own country. How can we love our own country if we do not love our own state. How can we love our own state if we do not love our own city and how can we love our city if we do not have anything but the deepest respect for house in which we stay?
It is a process. It is an order of things. We can rationalize it anyway we want to, but somethings do not change.
In my earlier blog post I had complained like a little child, that people in India love to break the process. This is more than evident in Mumbai. As an entire generation watched with bated breath who the next President of USA was going to be, much less than an handful of the same generation sat down and watched Goswami announce the BMC results. This is because, in this mad hat race to go ahead, we have taken the good and bad from this process of globalisation.
Globalisation has the unmatched benefits of sharing help across borders and blurring the edges so people can move freely across the world. It is a slow step towards the entire nation becoming one country and all of us becoming 'earthicans'. But, along with globalisation comes the issue of growing disregard of what we have in our own house, in our own backyard. As more and more countries start offering us choices in education, lifestyles and culture, our own heritage takes a backseat. The frustration of certain processes not working make this an ideal solution- let us substitute what is not working in our country by what works in another country. This happens across cities, states and countries.
We learn English to catch up with the rest of the world, and forget our own language. We start eating hashbrowns for breakfast and lose taste of upma and idlis. We start watching Friends every day, and have no time for Sarabhai v/s Sarabhai. Every movie we see in bollywood, we make a mental comparision to Hollywood, and we like it if it matches up. In almost all colleges I went, (I use the world 'almost' here because I hate to generalize), speaking Marathi was considered to be down-market and you could see students taking great pride in speaking with other accents.
Shashi Tharoor speaks highly of India's soft-power and the effect of the same on the world. But, we fail to see that as Indians, we ourselves have steered ourselves away from every thing our own country has to offer us. How can we expect the world to respect us, we do not respect ourselves?
But, coming back to the point, especially in a metropolitan city on a very large scale like Mumbai, we are forgettin everything that makes Mumbai, Mumbai. We forget how Shivaji Maharaj protected our land from mauruaders and kept the Marathi pride intact. We forget every Marathi freedom fighter who put India before his own life and freedom before his own dreams. We have become to blind to see the beauty and wonder of the forts that adorn the mountain ranges, from where the history of this region originated. We forget how a man with the small stature and unmatched intelligence single handedly stopped the entire region being over-run by invaders. The city of dreams, where every one in India wants to come, we are now trying to leave. The beauty of Marathi language is lost in hoardings of languages left to us as a gift by our rulers.
We forget all the efforts of our own granparents and the multiple generatione before them who built this state we are now living in.
Take a hike to Pratapgad, take a hike to Rajgad and stay in the fort for a night. Look around you, and see what history is made up of. Sensitize yourself to your own history. This is where you come from. Every minute in those places, you get the massive overwhleming feeling of being Marathi. You look down into the valleys and you see the trees and the railroad tracks and you see the ridges and the mountains stretching on and on. The feeling you get in that one moment cannot be put into words.
Why then, when you come down into this urban mess, that those feeling dont take more than a minute to fade away?
Take a stroll in Thane and go eat the spicy Mamaledaar misal. Go and eat the hot Vada Pavs of King George school. Take an afternoon off from watching Big Bang theory and see "Me Nathuram Godse Boltoy" or "Gela Madhav Kunikade". Give your mind some rest, and talk in Marathi with your friends, the way you are supposed to. Put down the Twilight book and pick up a P.L.Deshpande book.
Take a walk around Shivaji Park, eat a frankie or chaat and watch the sun set at the extremely polluted beach. But as you start to leave the park and take the taxi home, take a minute to look at the Shivaji statue overlooking this park. Take a minute to think about his and then leave.
The point is, you should always expand your horizons and take the best from every culture you encounter. But this should not happen at the expense of your own language, or at the expense of your own culture or at the expense of the pride you have for your motherland. Before you tell some one that you came to USA to help people or make a difference in the world, ask yourself one simple question "What have you done for your own mother state"?
I ask myself this question every day, and I have no answer to face myself.
Ed Lithium
