A clash of cultures

It was the autumn of 2008 a few weeks ago before the momentous American election. I was visiting India and I got into a bitter word fight with one of my best friends wives. We were discussing the possible election of Obama as America’s first black president.

“It will never happen”, she said with great certainty, “ I have lived in the U.S and the hatred of the blacks among the whites is so deep that none of them will ever vote for Obama.” She went on to cite chapter and verse to make her point. In a way she was echoing a view that Anand Girdhardas, a reported for the International Herald Tribune, observed about the present day U.S that there is “a fraying of the bonds of empathy, decency, common purpose. It is becoming a country in which people more than disagree. They fail to see each other. They think in types about others, and assume the worst of types not their own…Americans are becoming foreigners to each other. People in Texas speak of people in New York the way certain Sunnis speak of Shiites, and vice versa in New York. Many liberals I know take for granted that anyone conservative is either racist or under-informed. ..What is creeping into the culture is simple dehumanization, a failure to imagine the lives others lead. Fellow citizens become caricatures. People retreat into their own safe realms. And decency, that great American virtue,” has fallen away.

I argued that Obama would win because the country had changed, that I had been visiting the U.S since 1961 and never had I seen a more tolerant, more charitable and more optimistic people in the world. John Kennedy epitomized the spirit of the country from the creation of the Peace Corps to the harnessing of its innovative genius in  for the moon landing. In the past forty odd years I had travelled all over but had never encountered anything but courteous treatment even in the deep south- albeit their knowledge of the world beyond their county was shaky at best. I was sure that the better angels far dominated the few KKK sympathizers and that the fact that Obama was a candidate of a major party only proved my point.

Three years on, I find that both of us were, tragically, right. While Obama won the election, the hate and bile that followed in the years later were astounding in its intensity and passion. It seems that there were two cultures in the country – one dominated by KKK, racial prejudice, small minded meanness, easily swayed by the braying of Rush Limbaugh and the round the clock drivel peddled by Rupert Murdoch through the Fox channel – and the other which still remained idealistic, optimistic ( though increasingly less so), internationally minded, willing to help others, charitable and altruistic. What we were seeing was a clash of two cultures and which prevailed in the years to come would determine the fate of the country.

In a similar vein, the Anna Hazare campaign against corruption has exposed a clash of cultures in India as well. But here the clash is more dominated by different generations rather than any ideological conflicts. The older generation hangs on to power convinced that it is their right as part of the generation that fought for freedom of the country. In the last two decades, the prime ministers have invariably been in their seventies in country where the average age is less than half that. They still yearn for the time when age was revered and seniority was all-important. There’s was the age when you joined the government service and thought of it as the ultimate public service. In every sphere, you waited your turn and eventually reached the top of the pyramid in due time. The popular saying was that “ to reach the top, you must not do anything”. Doing something exposes you to some risk but if you nothing nobody can fault you. This was the prevailing culture for almost for four decades after independence.

The opening of the economy in the 1990’s however started radically changing this culture. Now the young had other avenues to pursue. Government service fell into disfavour and the best and the brightest went into the private sector. Coupled with this unshackling came others changes in cultural mores – money became the most important indicator of growth, honesty became a game for mugs, business magazines lauded the wealthy and rarely questioned the corrupt, respect for age was still given lip service but. in sotto voices, sons starting mocking their honest parents for their simplicity and naïveté. The heroes of the day changed from freedom fighters like Nehru or scientists like Bhabha or industrialists like Tata to cricketers and film stars.

Here too we are observing a clash of cultures – one pining for the simplicity and honesty of the old ways and the other impatient with the slow pace of change and filled with a willingness to take risks and to cut corners to get to the Holy Grail. The old values are now seen as obstacles to be shunted aside in the race to the top. The older generation has meanwhile forgotten that in their time, the leaders they followed were all young- Nehru was in his early thirties, Subhash Bose was yet to reach forty when he became the Congress President, Jay Prakash Narain too was in his thirties. And with the advent of freedom, the then older generation of Mahatama Gandhi chose to stay away from power but only provided guidance from outside seeking to preserve the values that had won us our freedom.

Which culture will prevail finally in the U.S and India I do not know. I only know which one I would like to prevail and which we should all pull for.