India is not a nation that innovates. It’s a nation that imitates. Our movies, our actors, our stories, our music, our songs, our work, our entertainment, our clothes, our houses, the food we eat, the way we think about ourselves, our education, the books we read, the people we would like to be, our marriages, our families, the way we raise our children, our thoughts, our words, our language, in fact everything about us – our life itself is one of imitation. Innovation comes from self-reliance in every sense of the term and we’re not self-reliant. Imitation is the nature of a servant. This powerful, slavish need to imitate is the essence of colonialism. The lines below from the Rajesh Khanna movie “Saccha Jhootha” written by Indeevar summarize the fact that we are mentally as much slaves as ever before:

Tann se to aazaad hum ho gaye hain
Mann se gayi na gulaami
Pardesi bhaasga aur vesh ko hi
Dete hain ab tak salaami
Bhool kar apna rang
Seekhe auron ka dhang
Apnepan ka chalam humse chhoota
Dil sacha aur chehra jhoota
Dil sacha aur chehra jhoota
Dil ko dekho, chehraa na dekho

The cities of India embody that slavish need to imitate. Bombay and after that Bangalore stand out in this respect. The so-called software boom is not to create original thinking. It is just to do what multinational companies want of us. An excellent civil or electronics engineer has no choice but to be a mediocre programmer because that’s what the market needs. This is not real development. This is a sign of underdevelopment in fact. Companies like Infosys and Wipro and Satyam are there to destroy innovation and inculcate imitation. I’m not saying there are no brilliant programmers. But these brilliant programmers are not innovators. They’re working on existing software. In that way we just make more money but that doesn’t mean we become more self-reliant as a nation. The reason being that we’re not innovating.

If you want to innovate you must live in the west. Which means that western nations gain with our labor. Sure we get paid for it. But, money in terms of foreign currency is not real wealth. Real wealth is where we don’t have to depend on others and we stand on our own feet. Where we can create and not be afraid to be ourselves. Where we’re conscious of ourselves as choice-making individuals who can take responsibility for our actions.

Imitation is the essence of mediocrity and it is common knowledge that politicians in Karnataka without exception are a mediocre lot. That’s true of the rest of India and the third world as well. The point is that the election in Karnataka has been reduced to an election in the capital city of Bangalore. What the hell does that mean? Does it mean that the people who live in the villages of Karnataka are not human beings? Are their needs completely insignificant compared to those of the Bangaloreans? Bangalore needs new roads, Bangalore needs more power, Bangalore needs new airport, Bangalore needs more infrastructure, Bangalore needs more development – and what about the rest of Karnataka – shall we simply forget that something like that exists? From the way the elections are going on in India, it looks like the cities are centers of development while the rest of India is a vote bank where populist measures would suffice without any real development like the 60,000 crore loan waiver in the annual budget that Chidambaram and the Congress party felt they were giving from their pockets to some roadside beggars.

These are cities where apathy and cynicism thrive and people are walking corpses like in science fiction movies where we see completely brainwashed masses that are alive without existing. They are programmed to think that they exist but they don’t in reality. My grievance against liberalization is that it has unleashed the forces of production in a certain direction while completely ignoring the majority of people who stand like silent spectators watching the show. They’re not part of the show because they cannot afford to be so. Their labor is necessary to run the show but they’ve to stand outside because they don’t fit in. They’re the leftouts of the one-sided development. The point is that the show is still only a show. All the money and success we see generated because of the IT industry or telecommunications does not mean we’ve developed as a nation. There is no creative function here. Just imitative. In effect we’ve to imitate western lifestyles and adopt western-based technology and pretend we’re still ourselves.

I’m not against young men and women choosing their lifestyles. But are their choices really coming from themselves are is it just conformism of another kind! The answer is obvious. These are sponsored lifestyles based on the money you make by doing slave labor in one of those multinational camps. These are alien to our culture and create contradictions. Women and men going to pubs and getting drunk or having boy or girl friends in itself is not a bad thing. But, is that you as a person is the issue here. These lifestyles do not come from within the culture or the self.

What is that within? Within is not just clinging to the past and ignoring modernization. Within is where we’re able to balance the needs of the community with individual aspirations in a modern framework and not just stick to one or the other. It’s not about right-wing nationalist Bal Thackeray versus the foreign occupier McDonald’s. Neither is real and both are essentially the same. It’s about “I” as an individual being able to creatively decide what suits me best as a person in relation to the rest of the communal space that I occupy in this country.

Arranged marriages and the gruesome system of dowry, for instance, are outdated in the current scenario. Women have more demands than in the days of my mother for instance when unconditional giving was the norm with no awareness that a woman is a body with needs of its own. I don’t think most Indian women desire to fall into the stereotype of the woman who gives herself unconditionally to the husband and his family or just be a father’s daughter or a brother’s sister. Times have changed and freedom for a woman or a man is absolutely essential as far as one’s own life, education, work and choice of partners is concerned with very little role for parents, relatives and neighbors.

That’s not the direction in which we’re going. Indian parents are as fascist as ever. In the majority of cases children have no freedom and if they’re girls believe me it’s close to mental and physical torture in this society. The worst torturers are the parents themselves who are too busy conditioning the children to be doctors or engineers. The children can go to America and Europe to prove themselves but at home they’re slaves to the materialistic obsessions of their parents. Children have no identity of their own. They have to fulfill dreams of their parents in the name of love and obedience. Our slavishness begins at home and it follows like a shadow wherever we go.

The heart of the problem is economic insecurity. Economic security – which means work, health care and education for the people living in the remote corners of India to stop them from migrating to cities. Bangalore is not Karnataka nor Bombay Maharashtra nor Madras Tamil Nadu. The rest of India is more important than the cities. If consecutive governments at the center and the state level paid attention to villages and uplift them for the past sixty years today we would be living in a different India. This is the core issue of the current election in Karnataka and the coming general elections at the national level in 2009 – are we going to develop the real India that lives in the villages or allow it to stagnate behind while we’re concentrating the wealth and resources of the nation in urban camps for the benefit of fascist elites?