India’s lost language of empathy

There was an India that had the luxury of smiling a bit critically, but indulgently, at the goody-goody ‘Mile sur mera tumhara’ ads on DD. And there is an India where everyone froths up on social media, trolling a washing powder company’s ad on Holi. The ad had an inclusive theme, but we stood clearly divided. There were calls to boycott the product; even the two kids representing two communities were not spared. Holi itself seemed tainted by the colours of hate.

That may have remained a premonition, a guesswork about the bitter flavours of public discourse carrying over into individual psyches, if not for what followed. On the edges of Gurgaon, where village India joins the neon-lit ‘millennium city’ in an uneasy aspirational curve, two kinds of abstract violence were suddenly realised in flesh and blood. City versus village, and Hindu versus Muslim. The tragic part is, neither need have happened; there simply was no provocation.

Unless you count the fact of a migrant Muslim family owning the rare double-storeyed house in the area as one. The family, from Uttar Pradesh, had settled there for better economic opportunities, running a gas stove repair shop and selling carpets. A nephew’s family had come visiting on Holi. The kids went out and were playing cricket.

Suddenly, a group of young men arrived and taunted them with lines like “go to Pakistan and play”. Soon, they returned with sticks and rods, barged into the house, and thrashed not just the men but the women too for daring to try to save the men.

That was the one Holi video that went viral. What is this rage that Indians now carry within themselves? What made this misanthropic rage India’s new normal? Even as the world fetes the woman prime minister of New Zealand for her sensitive resolve, we must rue our own lost language of empathy that others have learnt.