Five questions for cocktail circuit liberals
1. Why is dignity of labour so hard for you to understand?
No matter what the West - and more recently vociferous on the net NRIs - will say, it's true we have this supreme guilt conscious going on for those less fortunate and needy. This is often difficult for non-urban libs to understand. "How do you go about living your life seeming like you have no care in the world, with all this misery around you?" seems to be the message beamed at us from a lot of quarters.
The stereotyping is uncalled for - we care much more than tourists visiting for the first time or NRIs barking from the comfort of their first world homes - but what explains your reactionary appeasement? A Delhi Fab India clad lib, pausing from her shopping of organic candles in Khan Market, will not tick a Bartista staffer off for getting her order wrong the fifth time. A foreign educated, on the make lib will not pull up a colleague who is from a less fortunate background, but will become hysterical at the mistake of a co-worker who is somewhat of his social background.
Does dignity of labour translate as tolerance for shoddy work? Is that the long term view of liberals? Do they truly believe in equal opportunity, equal growth and the values of merit, and want to help the population as a whole in the achievement of those ideals, or do they want to barter that for short term lib popularity
2. Why do you look down on "other" ways of life, for example the rural one? Is that liberalism or self reference-ism?
This one is just awful. From the NYT cartoon to the piece in the Economist on the Madison Square event, to even pictures of buffaloes in local papers during the Haryana elections, the well-heeled libs are outraged at the "depiction of Indians" in the press, even suggesting it has racist undertones.
The self hatred in this stance apart, shouldn't well educated, well travelled libs have a wider worldview? Agrarian economies exist everywhere in the world - yet, nobody is outraged or full of hate for them the way home-grown libs are - and this, when the majority of our population lives in rural india and the urban libs are a minority - so how is it "stereotyping" if it's reality, right? Get it?
Pipe down. Tuck in your prejudices, libs. You are not the centre of the universe - of course you have the right to criticise others, but because they are wrong, not because they are different. If someone owns a buffalo, as opposed to your Tata Indica or Hyundai, it doesn't mean they are less better than you, except in your own little head. Get over it.
3. When calling out sexism, why do you become so blind to your own?
Agreed you have, by the position you find yourself in - well educated, forward looking, progressive lifestyles that more and more of you are privileged to lead, thanks to a growing economy - earned the right to speak for others less fortunate. But whatever makes you think this makes you not slightly more privileged human beings, but mini gods in heaven - or whatever name liberal paradise goes by - who are free from sin, and born to instruct others how to live?
Take, for instance, your views on the issue of gender inequality and sexism.
There you go, throwing hissy fits berating religious people for their outdated views - taunting people's religious beliefs in the name of calling out sexism - when your own liberal world - your liberal workplaces, to take the glaring example - are the number one failure in gender equality across the world and especially in India, where the female workforce at the top is dismally low. It is an inequality that years of liberalism, including the advent of feminism, has been unable to fix. So you see, people who live in glass houses... should just be a little more humble when they diss others.
4. Why do you fail to look within? Are you bigotry free? Are you sexism free? Stop using that condescending tone. You may mean well, but that doesn't mean you know better.
For liberals, you are pretty, shall we say, tight assed. You use strange long words like "women's agency" and "communal harmony" as if your agency has never got the better of you, and you are Susan Sontag and Gloria Steinem herself just because you got a chance to pose with her.
In reality - if you go by tradition of favour granting and bribe giving that goes on in well off sections of Indian society - not to mention the high instance of all kinds of crimes including female infanticide and rioting which are committed in high income brackets - you are as much a cog in the patriarchal and parochial machinery that have led to India being seen as having a corrupt, inefficient working system. Hardly effective to preach to the world equality and justice and meritocracy in that time when your own backyard is full of the skeletons of failed ideas and hypocrisy, no?
5. Why do you feel so entitled? And why do you hunt in packs? Are liberals meant to be intellectually free like lions or herd like sheep?
If one was to use images for isms, a lion would suit liberalism - at the top of the intellectual heap by courage and action, unafraid to roam in any part of the forest, doing its thing. You'd think the liberals would be out there, confronting the world, winning it over with their clean hearts and unfettered thinking and bold thought.
Yet, the urban libs huddle together at places such as India International Centre or the Taj Palace Hotel, wherever the free booze is available for the evening, hold their glasses of wine and diss the world outside. Go out, say your piece - say, for example, on a social networking site. But no, then they come back like wounded jackals, mulling over wine and cheese at the next do, howling about the racism and sexism they encountered. Very liberal
Sure there's a great deal of uncalled liberal bashing going on, but why blame others for putting you in unflattering stereotypical boxes when you've been doing it all your life? Meat eating, non bhenji, public school educated, sexually free folks, who do not want to acknowledge their heritage in any personal manner but only in a vaguely community way as decided by IHC or IIC event calendars, have been typecast in liberal zones as the ideal standing for progressive values. If you are truly committed to liberalism, the backlash would make you think and attempt mid course correction, rather than retreat into a bitter hole drawing a further distance between "us" and "them".