Myron J. Pereira
I owe my headline to the phrase “the unintended city,” coined by the social activist from Kolkata, Jai Sen.
The unintended city, he says, is the city which the planners and the municipal corporation forgot, but which grew up nevertheless — the slum, the shanty town, the congestion of hawkers around every road junction and railway station.
No one wanted it this way, and everyone wanted something else, but there they are.
Shelter and occupation are basic needs, and needs must be fulfilled. Life is more messy and far more tenacious than an architect’s blueprints.
An unintended city? So what did we intend in the first place? Sharp-edged high-rises and shopping malls, smooth surface transport where the trains run on time?
Alas, it all got mixed up, unintentionally.
I sometimes think India is an unintended country, which is why we’re uncomfortable and uneasy with the nation we have today.
After all, it wasn’t supposed to be that way at all.
Pandit Nehru didn’t want that part of it, with his dreams of steel plants, big dams and socialism. Nor did Mahatma Gandhi, longing for a republic of self-sufficient villages.
Nor did the Marxists, talking all the while of sampurna kranti (total revolution), and bickering over the strategies to achieve it.
Not M. S. Golwalkar and the RSS (Rashtriya Swayamsevak Sangh) either, yearning for a golden age of Hindutva to avenge the hurts of the past.
Not even B. R. Ambedkar who championed the cause of the underclass.
We had other dreams in August 1947, other grandiose intentions. How did we get stuck with this India today, this “soft state,” this “functioning anarchy?”
What else is unintended?
An “unintended” country. Jai Sen’s astute phrase points to something that is there, even though we didn’t expect it. Or to something which isn’t there, though we had planned for it all along. Something that passes beyond our purposefulness and control.
Come to think of it, there are several “unintended” realities that keep crashing into our awareness.
There’s the “unintended” body, for instance — not the glamorous specimen of the fitness magazines and the fashion ramp, but the body victimized by cellulite and anorexia, by obesity and malnutrition, and laid low by diabetes, heart disease, cancer, and AIDS, and ambushed by epidemics we thought we had controlled.
There’s also the “unintended economy” — part of what we earn, but which exists “in black,” unaccounted, untaxed, benami (without name, to conceal the identity of the true buyer), do numbri (concealed income) — useful only for ostentatious expenditure, crypto land deals, smuggling and crime, now grown so exponentially that it has virtually devoured the “white” economy, and dictates the fiscal policies of the government.
Funny money, how does it exist and not exist at the same time?
The unintended self
The “unintended” self. That’s where it all begins.
It exists, and yet it doesn’t. It remains unacknowledged, repressed, publicly denied. The “shadow,” that other face of ours away from the light — the illegitimate brother, the promiscuous sister, the alcoholic husband, the slut wife.
The neighbor, not a neighbor, but an outcast — bhangi, chamar, accursed of society. The tribal, seen as “savage” and uncouth — asura, bhoot, Adivasi. And most of all, women — exploited, brutalized, abused and enslaved.
The “shadow” in our land is the mark of the beast, the structural injustices of caste, class and skin color which makes accomplices of us all, and keeps the vast population shackled in death. There are pretensions to greatness in our land, and every so often we celebrate our glorious mythical past with ostentation and noise. Bharatiya Rajniti [political power] longs for its place in the sun.
But in the shadowlands of the present, daily life is beginning to rebel.
The people with no name demand a title of their own, not a bland government label. Everywhere the disorder is growing, in things great and small, as students, workers, Dalits, the displaced, and rural women are all talking out of turn and will not keep silent. They rally, they march, they block roads, they shout slogans.
The “churning of the ocean” has begun, and we are shocked at the filth and poison vomited out of the depths of our traditions and culture.
What then?
Repress your “shadow” and it will overwhelm you. Embrace it and learn to live with it with respect. Befriend, do not despise your sinful self. Welcome the prodigal son. Do not stone the adulterous woman. Forgive the indebted servant. Shelter the widow and the orphan, the child laborer and the girl prostitute. Receive the Dalit into church and sit next to him. Fight for the refugee, for you too were once a stranger and a migrant.
Share with the poor the good news you believe in.
Then perhaps this uncomfortable and unintended country will become what we always hoped it would be — a haven of prosperity, a place of reconciliation, a land of peace.
source : uca news