A few Januarys ago I was in a Mumbai suburb staying with relatives. They live in a large apartment complex with four or so buildings and dozens of families. It was a lively place, with the usual camaraderie and cacophony one comes across in such housing complexes. The evenings were especially vibrant: kids playing and screaming, adults chatting and whispering, bikes spluttering and rickshaws honking.
Luckily I was there also on January 26. It was quite festive, and many events had been organised to commemorate Republic Day. All through the afternoon and evening kids were dancing and singing and showing off many kinds of talents. One particular performance that January day was especially striking. A little boy, maybe around 10 years of age, belted out what appeared to be a new recruit in the hefty pantheon of Indian patriotic songs. With much gusto and emotion, he crooned multiple stanzas of, well, Desh ke gaddaron ko, goli maaro salon ko.
It was a jarring moment, although perhaps only to the few folks in the housing complex who recognised the venality involved in making a kid sing that “song”. But it was also befitting the so-called New India. A 10-year-old child grittily singing – obviously trained and encouraged by his parents – of murdering other Indians (“traitors”) as a patriotic duty, was appropriately symbolic of the annihilation of the nation’s constitutional values on a day we are supposed to commemorate the constitution.
For all the weird discomfort of that day, the experience took me back to some fond childhood memories. Firstly, I felt thankful to my good fortune, for growing up I had not been exposed to and absorbed such normalisation of violence and bigotry. Then I especially remembered Himesh Sir, my English teacher, and his endearing eccentricities. If he were in charge, he would have completely jettisoned all the patriotic showbaazi involved in January 26 and August 15. He would have let students just play and have fun, or perhaps not even bother coming to school and just eat jalebis at home.
A Brahmos launcher during a rehearsal for the India’s 2011 Republic Day Parade. In 2021, an India Brahmos missile test misfired into Pakistani territory, sparking concerns of escalation between the rival nuclear powers. Photo: PIB
Himesh Sir was a brilliant educator apart from being a highly idiosyncratic individual. For example, for some weird reason he had the first page of philosopher Bertrand Russell’s autobiography fully memorised. That page, titled ‘What I Have Lived For’, was, and is, just permanently etched in his memory: even as recently as in 2022, he recited all 320 words of it to a group of us friends as part of the answer to our question, ‘Sir, how did you come to love the English language so much?’.
It was Himesh Sir who introduced me to Russell and other great thinkers and writers when I was a kid. He helped me discover the intoxicating world of books and the power of knowledge. Like in many other cities of the world, the streets and footpaths in India’s cities have always been a paradise for book lovers, with low-cost copies of all kinds of books on sale if one knew where to look. Sir would often talk about these open-air bookstores during his classes, telling us how he bought this awesome book for “two rupees only” and that magnificent volume for “five rupees only” from the streets of Mumbai and Pune. In his house Himesh Sir had a massive collection of books, mostly bought from such booksellers and from stores like Bombay’s Strand which he was extremely fond of.
Much of my childhood and early teenage period was spent leafing through his collections and reading many of his recommended books. C.E.M. Joad’s The Story of Civilization was among my favourites, and I have always loved Joad’s definition of what it means to be ‘civilised’: “making and liking beautiful things, thinking freely, and living rightly and maintaining justice equally between [hu]man and [hu]man”.
Sir was also a big fan of the iconic English grammar book often just called ‘the Wren and Martin’. I happened to have a withering old copy of it gifted to me by an Anglo-Indian elderly neighbour. The Wren and Martin had a large number of passages and poems from English literature dotted throughout its hundreds of pages, and even though I never studied literature or read the classics (in any language), I became aware of and admired the beauty and profundity of great writing because of this and other books I studied through Himesh Sir’s prodding and encouragement.
Illustration: Pariplab Chakraborty
Ever since that Republic Day experience, my mind frequently travels to all these memories when I think of what kids today are reading (and singing), and the kinds of ideas they are being exposed to. As a child I often heard adults employing the Marathi proverb वाचाल तर वाचाल, which basically means ‘reading will save you.’ Today I wonder how much relevance this saying has, considering that a lot of what kids, teenagers, and young adults are reading are WhatsApp messages, social media posts, and generally awful and hateful propaganda masquerading as history, news, and expert opinion. Of course, it is true that the Instagram-bred youth anyway, for quite a while now, have been doing less of reading and more of ‘consuming’. A part of me understands that my discomfort with these developments might just be the inevitable and often annoying fondness one develops, as one ages, for how things were in the past. But at the same time, it is true that we simply cannot ignore the banality of evil and the normalisation of bigotry, immorality, and lies that has become so prominent in our country over the past decade.
To be sure, kids were exposed to bigoted ideas and misinformation even in the past. I remember some of my schoolmates and collegemates harbouring baseless ideas and making false claims about history, often exposed to those through parents and other relatives who were close to one or more of the numerous Hindutva organisations that dot our country. However, especially for the rest of the kids (like me) whose parents were too busy making ends meet to bother themselves with chest-thumping and “reviving” imaginary past glories, there were multiple layers of checks and balances in those days, especially in mainstream literature and media.
For example, while I remember reading about and watching news on communal riots and murders throughout my childhood, I cannot think of any mainstream discourse in which the killings were justified and the murderers glorified. Patriotic TV shows and films were almost always inclusive (even if, as I realised later, the Muslim and Christian representation was often paternalistic and the representation of Bahujan castes and groups almost absent). One of the most striking things I remember reading is a long article on the 1984 anti-Sikh pogrom in Delhi. It was a highly detailed analysis and I learned several gory details of the violence. The article did not, however, make me start hating any broad religious or caste-based groups – I just ended up feeling immense anger towards the actual perpetrators of the violence as well as their political and bureaucratic enablers.
Illustration: Pariplab Chakraborty
Today, on the other hand, even a regular news report on something like the farmers’ protest often ends up making young folks start labelling ordinary Indians as terrorists and traitors. Kids now are regularly coming across twisted takes on violence on every platform, often high up in search results and ‘Suggested Videos/Articles’, as well as during dinner time on mainstream TV channels. Then there are parents who are proudly teaching kids to sing “Let’s go shoot and kill the traitor bastards”. More shockingly, this is all happening even as our education system is in absolute shambles. I was lucky to have gone to a school with brilliant teachers and a well-run administration, and overall to have grown up during a period when mainstream media was generally serious about realistic analyses of the many broken systems in the country including education. Today we are at a stage when the Indian state and the mainstream elite together are both robbing millions of kids of good educational opportunities in formal institutional spaces, as well as encouraging their mis-education via other spaces, most significantly the propaganda-suffused social media discourse.
If the wanton spread of misinformation, the normalisation of twisted morals, and the disdain for critical and intellectual rigor, all continue with the same zeal and speed as is happening today, with kids growing up in such a toxic cultural environment, it won’t be long before we become a country mostly peopled by individuals whose minds are suffused with bigoted concepts and bereft of any logical thinking skills. We will become a country peopled by, well, ‘bigidiots’.
We will see (and are indeed already seeing) more and more individuals who won’t be able to appreciate basic moral ideas like justice and equality, and who won’t be able to distinguish between reality and lies. We will become a nation whose gullible public can be easily goaded to believe that their lives and their country are being ‘destroyed’ by Muslims and leftists and feminists and farmers and whatnot, even as politicians, news anchors, diaspora Indians, film actors, industrialists and other elites all take us for a royal ride. As some brave, smaller media platforms in our country have been reporting for years, relaying hateful propaganda has become a highly profitable business venture for the elites and ‘influencers’ in India, most of whom are cunningly sending their kids and loved ones either out of the country or into the protective higher echelons of the current ecosystem, even as they poison the discourse and the social fabric for the rest of us hundreds of millions.
I remember learning in school that the lotus flower blooms best in dirt and filth. If India’s political world is any measure, that certainly seems to be the case: there is filth all around, and a few political and ‘cultural’ organisations are thriving even as the public leaps from one crisis to the next. A particularly worrying consequence of this pervasive dirt, of course, is that kids and teenagers are being constantly exposed to intellectual garbage. It is not hard to conclude that when they become adults, many (or most) of them might lack basic decency and compassion, as well as fundamental logical thinking skills.
Garbage in, garbage out, as they say.
That is, until we acknowledge the seriousness of the toxic state of our nation and resolve to clean up the filth and throw out the poisonous lotuses being powered by it. We have to work, with all our might, towards a garbage-mukt Bharat: a newer India where goli maaro-type toxicity is neither normalised nor rewarded.
Kiran Kumbhar is currently studying the history of science at Harvard University, focusing on the history of medicine in modern India. He is also a physician and a health policy graduate.
