We don’t think, therefore are we?

There is no one to define us for ourselves, not even aJerry Springer, who could give Middle America a fantasy vehicle for its petty peccadiloes. Meanwhile, of course, people fall through the cracks in Chamoli. There is no national thread that binds us anymore, not even cinema which has been taken over by urban Indians whose familiarity with anything other than a 35 mm film is suspect. Television veers madly between eyebrow-raising mean middle class morality tales and eye-rolling displays of gore and ghoul.

And even as a lame duck government, meant to give us a sense of purpose, totters every time the Lady from Chennai steps into her Tata Sierra, ad hocism becomes our national ideology. And in this ad hocism, all is welcome.

The National Archives will not bat an eyelid when accepting 15 letters written by Yashpal Kapoor, former MP, but better known as Indira Gandhi’s campaign manager, and passing it off as national heritage. Having spent over Rs 50 crore celebrating 50 years of Indian Independence in an entirely forgettable fashion, the Government will notthink twice before doing something similar for the golden jubilee of the Indian republic. And its way of marking 300 years of the Khalsa Panth will be to whitewash and concretise the whole of Anandpur Sahib. If the taxpaying citizen has an objection to all this, no one has heard it, quite naturally too in an era where even protests have become an organised racket.

The media which is meant to author history in a hurry is too busy squeezing stories into less and less space. The civil servant is trying to adjust to a promiscuous political environment. The watchdog bodies are being packed with hangers-on and groupies. And the government is too busy being “pragmatic”.

Which is why it can talk about swadeshi but be the most pro-globalisation regime. It can speak of never discussing Kashmir but sign on the dotted line where Pakistan indicates. It can attack the Patents Bill when in Opposition and pilot it through Parliament when in power. Anything goes, as the song says, as time goes by.

And all this ishappening even as the world hurtles towards the millennium, and re-examines its own soul. Old certainties have disappeared and new beliefs are germinating. Capitalism has been redefined by the investor czars, socialism has been rendered a dead duck by proponents like New Labour and even the great hope of today, the Third Way, sounds foolishly out of sync with the chaotic political reality of most of the world.

We who had the patent on words, with perhaps the finest oral tradition, have now lost even that superiority to the West, which has managed to make even a mini-European war into a verbal marathon. Those who do manage to speak for us do so from a perspective of both advanced age and enhanced status. The rest of us, the voluntarily disenfranchised (as opposed to those who didn’t have a choice) have just given up on our right to think and speak.

So even when we go through the motions of what now appear to be annual democratic exercises, we have not given ourselves a new identity, a new culture or even anew voice. We can change our cabinets every six months but catch us giving them a thorough cleaning. To quote from Salman Rushdie’s latest novel (and he’s someone who knows all about oral banishment): “Like slaves voting for slavery or brains for lobotomy, we kneel down before the god of all moronic micro-organisms and pray to be homogenised or killed or engineered: we promise to obey.”