Can we not think as a Nation for once?

The events over the last week have actually motivated me to put up another post. Yes, I am referring to the new state imbroglio that our Government has been dealing with. I guess we Indians have still not learnt from our own history. How many times have we fought among ourselves on ethnic or religious lines and each time we have ended up becoming a conquered nation or a colony for some foreign power. Yes, the world order has changed today but the mentality of human beings has certainly not undergone any change. We are surrounded by neighbours who would love to see up all broken up into pieces. And none of our neighbours would actually be willing to help us, in fact they might be the first to grab their piece of land in such a situation. The truth is we are precariously perched, on one side we have the muslim fundamentalist Taliban and on the other side expansionist China. And yet we are inside, unaware of dangers that we may face in future busy accusing each other fighting each other.

What is it that we want to achieve by this strife on regional, religious and even tribe and caste level. What do the perpetrators think?. That because they belong to a particular group, the invaders will not harm them? Well, they need to think again, all this groupism is hardly of any significance to others, for all invaders we are the residents of this land mass and they will kill or destroy without discrimination. Possibly then we would realise that we are all equal. When we will all be on the altar for sacrifice, this realization may happen but possibly will be too late by then. Can we not preent this catastrophe. Yes, we can but for that once we have to think like a nation, we have to think of ourselves as Indians and not individual groups, only then we can ever come close to doing some thing positive for the future.

The idea of a country called India is possibly new but we all share similar ethos and if we work towards being one we can do it. Are we all that different, as we project. A good example is provided by our movies in regional languages. If movies and their content is taken as an expression of social structure and issues we are all surprisingly similar. Only we speak differently and eat differently, is this so huge a issue that we cannot even tolerate another language or food. I dont think so, we are basically acting like foolish and immature people. We need to grow out of our phobias about people with different language, religion and cultures.

The process ahs to start from a young age. Schools, they need to emphasise this fact beyond any doubt that we are Indians first and then whatever we want to if we really want to be something. Let us eliminate surnames and titles from our names to begin with, let us assume a name like sachin bharti or sachin kumar for boys and geeta bharti or geeta kumari only for girls only instead of any other titles. I know this is a major problem but may be over the time we can come out of our self inflicted divisions and silos to undersatnd that we are all Indians and we need to work together, save ourselves and our land from others and that no one is going to come to our aid in the time of emergency. Once we realize all this we would have taken a birth as a nation in the real sense of it. Amen