India Shining?

living in modern india leaves one slightly out of breath; the nation cranes its neck to try and finish the race just in time; our cellphones, our cars, even our film stars have the "imported" veneer--the flashy, brand-new feel that makes things seem unreal much like the plastic smell that came of toys freshly unwrapped.

And while we strain every breath and every muscle to prove to the world that we are "modern"; that we get it, we are indeed "down with it," the rest of our population, the people who unfortunately were only oppressed and exploited in British India, those who never got a chance to learn the "global" language, those who do not know what "post colonial" means and maybe do not care while we, the middle-class, English medium school products whine about our cultural angst, those masses go on tilling and battling failing crops, killing themselves with mass suicide that is mentioned for ten minutes on national tv before another reporter prances around a film star's house trying to get a peek of what they will wear when she will marry another film star who is similarly besieged by reporters who want a peek at what he will wear...

it seems as a nation, we moved from the dark ages to a postmodernist existence without ever having a true enlightenment. a desire for truth and rationality, a moment when we evaluated the real worth of our morality, our conventionalities. we simply shifted gears into acknowledging the relative worth of everything we cannot explain as "tradition," gift-wrap our country as exotic, as a mish-mash of socio-temporal realities.