What We Are...

A picture speaks a thousand words. Now take hundreds of pictures, all speaking about the same thing in different flavors. And then try to listen to what they are saying.

Seeing is believing, is something that all of us have come across one time or the other. In one of my google searchs for black and white photographs, i came across a beautiful online gallery. It had pictures that within the binary confines of Black and White deftly painted a million emotions.

The pictures were arranged thematically, and neatly tucked amidst the poignant titles like Love, Life, Faeries, and People; there was 'India'. So inspite of the Synthetic Patriotism that Ms. Bachi Karkaria wrote about in her essay last sunday on the Sunday Times Life; the urge to see what the other eye of the othercamera saw India as, dominated the desire to plunge into the virtual gallery.

In the all 15 breathtaking photographs was the image of an India that has characteristically been referred to as the land of snakecharmers, sadhus, and classically 'where people still ride on elephants on the roads'. I do not intend to pass value judgements here, neither am i interested in dictating the artists eye and his/her freedom. But what concerns me is the question that, is that really what it is? Are we still where we were a 100 years back? Has there been a movement at all?

VS Naipaul in his book India: A Wounded Civilisation writes, 'the outer world matters only in so far as it affects the inner'. If that is the inner vision of India within the minds of those who observe it , it would not matter what lofty claims we make or accomplish. We shall always be seen as a civilization of 'alarming innocence'. What Naipaul mentions as a nation of 'people having there being', and the possesors of 'underdeveloped egos'.

A photographer freezes the moments of life, An artist who can capture a fleeting moment and preserve it for eternity. And what he sees is what he shows. While we cannot be what we are not, we cannot afford to be seen otherwise. Nations have fragile egos. Egos made up of a billion perceptions are susceptible to chinks at every link. And while the only difference between a sunrise and sunset is the cognition of time and direction. India should not forget that it is not a subject for a painter. Aesthetics aside there is reality outside the canvass and the celluloid, and it is not just enough to possess that reality. The fundamental principle of Cogito Ergo Sum applies equally in case of nations. We are what we think, and what we think is what we become.

So while Lata Mangeshkar may sing, "..kya naam hai apna jahaan mein, khade hain kahaan pe hum?...", we should take a moment and think where we are, and more than that who WE are?

We the people...