Where is India heading?

[thorbiorn]

While working on a paper about India, I came across a few interesting articles from the 16th anniversary of the magazine Outlook India _http://www.outlookindia.com/content10803.asp#Youth: 16th Anniversary Special

Here follow two of the articles. The first is an analysis of the psychology of many young Indians, especially those who are a bit better off. The address is _http://www.outlookindia.com/article.aspx?278703

youth matrix

‘The Indian Dream Will Be An American Photocopy’

The head of the department of psychiatry at Nimhans Bangalore speaks on the present and future young of India with the insight of a sociologist and social psychiatrist

Sugata Srinivasaraju Interviews Dr Sanjeev Jain

Dr Sanjeev Jain is head of the department of psychiatry at Nimhans Bangalore. A clinical psychologist, he speaks on the present and future young of India with the insight of a sociologist and social psychiatrist. Dr Jain is currently engaged in researching and writing a four-volume history of the growth of psychiatric services in India. The final volume will focus on the psychiatric history of India’s partition in 1947. Excerpts from an interview with Sugata Srinivasaraju:


What is your assessment of the post-liberalisation generation?

What has been evident in the last 15-16 years is the so-called opening up of the economy or rather a blending of the Indian consciousness into a multiple- channel global consciousness in terms of attitudes and lifestyles, experienced only by people who can read and write English. It is debatable if the rest of India has changed. Clinically speaking, what is worrying about the young is the rising rate of depression, suicides and drug and alcohol abuse. With the intensely competitive environments, there is also more and more unease at social norms. Autonomy, freedom issues that are common with adolescents across the globe come up here too, but they get peculiarly amplified because the parental generation and the younger ones, in certain classes, are really at different portions of the wave and trough cycle.

What is it that you find peculiar about today’s young?

Frankly, there is nothing particular or peculiar about today’s young. The issues that surround them are the same old ones—roles, families, societies, jobs. Only, it gets differently articulated and differently experienced because social matrices have changed. These issues now transcend what were clear-cut boundaries earlier. Today, people come with problems because they are marrying someone from a different region of India speaking a different language. Earlier, it used to be a caste issue or a neighbourhood issue. At a fundamental level, these are variations on the same theme—of independence, autonomy, a breakdown of what were stable family attitudes. Again, we don’t really know how stable these were in the real sense.

Why are the young wooed so aggressively by advertisers/corporates?

I don’t think it has a qualitative content to it. It’s just a marketing ploy. If you go to big malls, you’ll find only foreign brands. If you go to certain other stores, you’ll only find local Indian stuff. So what they are doing is bifurcating the young. The young who’ll prefer Indian fusion music, Indian writers or appear to be rooted, and then the other, who’ll be ashamed of all this. It is an artificial bifurcation foisted on the purchasing power or pocket money of the youth. It is deliberately and politically constructed to promote a corporate ethos. The most dangerous part of this is that the youth tend to become non-self-critical. The self-awareness, or critical element, is hardly encouraged. The stress is on consumption and appearance. It is made out that to be effective you have to appear in a certain fashion. What you really are doesn’t matter.

What repercussions does this have on the psyche of the young?

It comes up in therapy situations off and on. We often get complaints from parents saying that their son insists he needs a Rs 3,000 shoes. But the son says that is the way it is. Another common complaint is from parents about their daughters dressing in a particular way. But the daughter says if she doesn’t wear tight tees, she will not be accepted by her friends. Social psychology is a very prominent driving force. It is only in the late 20th century that social psychology has been overtaken entirely by advertising. A lot of it is manufactured emotion. Whether this or that person will win in the Big Boss household is a manufactured emotion. Cheering crowds at cricket games is a manufactured emotion. There is no real connect between the players and the audience.


So a ruptured self-criticality defines the younger generation?

I don’t think it defines the younger generation. But it defines the society which is trying to manipulate the younger generation and create a kind of serfhood. Self-criticality is not a virtue anymore. You are supposed to be happy. You have to appear to be happy. You have to keep a happy face even if you are not, otherwise nobody wants to know you. It is this that is really troublesome. In a wider psychological sense, not in the clinical sense, one worries about this kind of uncritical optimism. We seem to be obsessed with growth. A German scholar at a lecture made an interesting statement recently. He said growth for the sake of growth is the philosophy of a cancer cell. He also said that we must be sure what it is that we are growing towards and growing into. To have only economic parameters, to have only GDP benchmarks, will not help.

What happens to a nation when the young sacrifice their self-criticality?

The nation ceases to exist. A disconnect with self-criticality, at one level, is replaced by a sham affiliation to narrow and parochial interests. There is a group dynamic that sets in. At a simple college level, it manifests as a local vs non-locals debate. At a larger level, it becomes a Telangana vs rest of Andhra or Kashmir vs rest of India debate. What is amazing is the logic is exactly the same. We are now running politics at the level of college-level identities. Group identities which are essentially adolescent, teenage fantasies etc threaten to engulf the entire system because we have become so uncritical. Identities have become excessively local. What is worrying in India is that one assumes that commerce and economics will bind the nation together, but that is not a given.

Will a self-obsessed generation be interested in any kind of larger social or cultural movement?

Our societies have become slightly more undemocratic from when we were young. In the sense that access to other people’s time and space is now very rigidly controlled by a media structure. College festivals are sponsored by media houses or corporates. There is actually no unencumbered physical or political space. So young people learn to manipulate or learn the ropes of this ‘give and take’ very early. They know that being independent or sticking out does not really help. All this is happening ostensibly through non-political institutions and instruments. What we increasingly see is young people don’t want to be identified with the accidents of their birth. The young here feel constrained by localism and they try to escape it in their own way. We are not aggressively building a sense of a safe society in India which can actually accommodate the aspirations of the young. There is no Indian dream, equal to an American dream, for the youngsters.

Can they then forge an Indian dream?

At the level of subversion, an Indian dream will be an American dream. That is the whole problem. The Indian dream will be a photocopy of the American dream which is not a good idea. The worry is, if young people don’t get enthused then we have a huge problem on hand. We are still riding on the crest of the hopes and aspirations of the people of the ’50s. If the young generation becomes cynical and if they don’t plan like the people of the ’50s who had a hope for India, that is serious trouble. The loss of social hope is an unquantifiable impoverishment.

Do you see a loss of social hope?

In medical terms, you can see it both by its absence and by its unnatural presence. Absence meaning very few people talk about it. All they talk about is buying this car, getting that job, getting a visa to that country etc. At the other end, you see people who are railing against it and hitting their head against a wall.

What of the young participating in the Anna Hazare movement?

Again, this creation is like a popstar version of the truth. Because it’s a tokenism. A German writer once asked: “When injustice is sliced into thin slices, how thin is the slice that I should put on my daily bread?” If you replace this injustice with corruption, how many people in India can actually claim to be free from corruption? This comes up at various levels. Recently there was a survey of the state of the SC/ST hostels in Karnataka. The fact that there should be hostels for the SC/STs is not commented upon. Why should there be separate housing for them is beyond me. This is not a public debate at all. If you are segregating young people right through their undergraduate, postgraduate and doctoral levels, what corruption and what young people are we talking about? At various levels, we teach the young the ropes of the ‘snake and ladder’ game rather too efficiently. So they become aware of their constrained kind of identity and this spikes any sense of universal hope and solidarity. It is the same as the absence of idealism. Actually, the capacity for humanism is not considered a good thing anymore. You are I and me. You are you and we are never together.

But what makes a young mind identify with someone like Anna?

In some ways, it is anachronistic. He is against gay behaviour, against liquor consumption, against free mingling of the sexes. It boggles my mind that a young person can fall for all that. So there is a compartmentalisation that has taken place, you don’t see the wider social context. This is again a result of the absence of self-criticality and is exactly what the corporate media wants. It wants you to be conservative. It wants you to be feudal.

Could you comment on the young and social media?

I think social media is built mostly for specific commercial or sexual networks. There has been an issue in the US where many multinationals, especially attire-makers, create these dummy accounts for shoes or tees they want to sell and ask ‘friends’ if they have seen these cool new shoes or dress? And then that becomes viral and the sales shoot up. This is about the absence of real communication. It is like the age-old ‘monkey and the cage’ psychiatry test. You put a monkey in a cage and it starts having symptoms of social withdrawal. If you open the window into an adjoining cage, the act of observing another monkey is more than enough for this monkey to neglect food. So it will spend more time obsessively watching the other monkey. When you deny real human contact, or any sense of human communication, then these kind of alter ego communications start. What you have to worry about is why is actual physical life so impoverished that the young need to have 400 phantom friends. It is a kind of narcissism. We do get clinical cases in this regard. If they come all the way to clinics like ours, then it is literally the tip of the iceberg. I don’t know what the iceberg is, but if I see a tip, there is an iceberg below.

The next one is about how little is done to counter the injustices committed in and by the society. It is from _http://www.outlookindia.com/article.aspx?278704

anti voice

[size=10pt]All Aboard The Slave Ship [/size]

An open letter to Young India, callous and comfy in its cocoon
Meena Kandasamy


Dear Citizen of Youngistan,

Hi!

You are the talk of the town these days, so, you know, I wanted to talk to you.

You are a student. You seek to be highly educated, but you turn a blind eye to the academic terrorism that routinely cripples and kills poor students in universities. You never acknowledge the privilege of exclusivity. You strut about with the confidence that you will never slip below the poverty line. You never know the pain of exclusion. You would have never lost your home in a slum demolition drive.

On the other hand, you know, with self-assured grace you make up India’s fanciful, much-advertised youngistan edge. You flaunt the fact that you are one of the 120 million youth that your country will add to its workforce over the next decade. You forget that this workforce, devoid of any working class consciousness, shall only serve to launch the latest edition of slave trade. Welcome aboard, dude! The Slave Ship is waiting for you. If and when India’s economy goes into freefall mode, you will be the first to flounder. Just remember that.

You also like to imagine yourself as a sexually restless youngster. Sadly, diktats and death threats make you seek shelter in matrimonial websites with drop-down menus listing 450 sub-castes. You blame this casteism on parental pressure. In your hallowed opinion, caste should be annihilated. You say that this is possible only by discontinuing affirmative action policies for adivasis and Dalits. You have anecdotal evidence to prove that reservation equals ruin.

You also think that India’s biggest problem is a boatload of terrorists from Pakistan. You have not heard of Khairlanji or Gadchiroli or Koodankulam; they are multi-syllable names of places that have never managed to sneak into your sublime conversations. Ultra-ambitious, you only enter lands that require your passport, your visa and your commercialised skill-sets. You are India’s shining, swaggering export. You have sold your soul for a song. You have sold your song for a sophisticated accent. You have sold your sophisticated accent for a sanitised silence.

Most of the time, you do not even speak your mother tongue. You only learn the languages that pay: C++, Java, Python, English. In spite of your mastery over two-and-a-half languages, you choose to remain voiceless. Abjuring violence in the way of old souls, you renounce every aggressive drive to assert yourself.

Maybe you earnestly believe in the development panacea. Maybe you are bamboozled by its seductive, saleable divinity. You don’t realise that government-style development is a devil that walks backwards, drinks blood, feeds on corpses and fattens on millions of tonnes of bauxite and iron. It goes by multiple aliases: Essar, Vedanta, Posco. Like its cross-cousin democracy, development is widely believed to be a rumour to keep rural masses in a hysteric state.

And perhaps, like your home minister, you take pride in being a patriot, unaware of the atrocities of your army in Kashmir and the Northeast and Sri Lanka and Bangladesh and far-flung African countries. You are blase about how your tax money ends up being used for mindless militarisation projects. Since “our republic cannot bear the stain of killing her own children” (as the Supreme Court observed in the fake encounter case of Maoist spokesperson Azad), the state has efficiently come up with an arrangement of convenience in which the children pay for each other’s bullets. The republic remains stainless and squeaky clean. You end up with blood on your hands. Perhaps you sponsored the bullets that killed seven Dalits in a police firing at Paramakudi last month.

Unrest simmers all over society, but as you are extremely busy hanging out in some shopping mall, you have no time to tell your government to behave. How can you talk to power when you do not teach yourself the truth? You do not know who or where the dam-displaced are. You have never shed tears for the victims of Operation Green Hunt. You do not bother to know that hundreds of Tamil fishermen from your country were shot dead by the Sri Lanka navy even as the Indian coast guard roamed the seas. You know next to nothing about India’s flawed foreign policy, not even the fact that your government supplied arms and strategic advice as it actively colluded in the genocide of one hundred thousand Tamils in Sri Lanka in May 2009. You buy the lie that everyone who died in Mullivaikkal was a Tiger and a terrorist. Why, even the discovery of more than two thousand bullet-ridden bodies of Kashmiri youth in mass graves does not drive you to despair.

Would you care to understand the pressing need for plebiscite in Kashmir, or the separate statehood for Tamils in Eelam? You have no sympathy for states that seek to break away. You are taught to think that Telangana spells trouble. In your limited worldview, secession is a swear word, self-determination is suicide.

And because you are impatient, you are in no mood to hear the stories of these struggles. You cannot make up your mind, NDTV and cnn-ibn do that for you. Therefore, you bleed before every heart-breaking, hair-splitting reality show and news bulletin. You cheer for Anna Hazare and glorify every Gandhian impostor. You are a self-anointed crusader against corruption. Your militant attire is Fabindia chic. Your deadliest weapon is candle-light. Your agenda is available online. You want to bring back the black money your politicians made, but you lack the guts to permanently put them out of business. Your soft-pedalling will ensure that you are saved. So, you will never share the fate of anti-mining activists killed in fake encounters. You will never be forced to disappear. You will never be a half-widow. You will never be killed in a police firing because your stylised protest will never provoke the state. You will never be tortured, raped, maimed or murdered in custody because you will never stand up for the bloody things that count. You will never realise what it means to pay with your life. Your craving for safety is the curse on your country.

You are seen only in stage-managed shows where you are called upon to exhibit sound and fury like a fashionable scarecrow. Caught up in consumer culture, you don’t care to educate, agitate, organise. You leave it to the corporates to choreograph your consensual dissent. There is Team Anna’s dream merchandise, and for every metro, a franchise to rerun the same lacklustre demonstrations. When will you learn to attack a system in order to alter its agenda? When will your protest be proof of your pent-up anger? Will you come up with an activism that cannot be appropriated? No other country awaits a revolution as eagerly as ours, no other country needs one as desperately either. This revolution is not somebody else’s business. Where is your characteristic killing rage? Where is mine, for that matter?

I writhe in guilt as I write to you. My searing anger at you is merely an exercise in self-flagellation; I lay no claim to a moral high ground. Sometimes, I am afraid that I am you. My dreams explode but my callousness kills me. I see in you every weakness that shows up in me. I write to you because I believe that you could be the stronger one. Perhaps you will heed the call to arms, some day you will don combat gear. Some day you will step out of your selfish skin and speak up for the people. Some day you will wage war against every injustice and uproot every oppression. Some day your sacrifice will set us free.

Out of habit, don’t look for the ‘Like’ button as you finish reading this. Look for liberation. Learn to fight.

Love,
M

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(Kandasamy is a poet and activist)

On the one hand the articles are about India, yet one in six of the worlds population live there, and similar situations are present in many other countries?