Roots of the problem

The HT/CNN-IBN ?The State of the Nation? survey reveals a deep insecurity bred by a TV-led wave of synthetic, westernised culture that is resulting in our youth taking refuge in the ?traditional?

If fear and love are indivisible, so too are fear and hate. Hate is an automatic response to fear, for fear humiliates.

HT Image

— Graham Greene

To some who have been concerned about certain trends that have become visible in society at different levels, the findings of the recent HT/CNN-IBN survey, ‘The State of the Nation’, will come as no surprise. Younger people are, by and large, more conservative. They prefer arranged marriages, they don’t support inter-religious marriages, there is an acceptance, if not outright support, of caste divisions.

True, there are a large number who do not subscribe to these attitudes, but those who do are the majority. They are the ones who are in strength out there.

Then there are other trends that are not very strong but still noticeable. One of this is the number of Muslim girls who choose to wear the traditional hijab.

There is also evidence of more active participation by younger people in traditional religious festivals, not only because they enjoy it but because of their empathy with the religious sub-text.

This is not to say that the young are all becoming traditional or fundamentalist or anything silly like that. It’s just that these trends underscore some of these slight but discernible changes in behaviour.

Oddly enough, these appear to be a kind of reaction to the television-led wave of synthetic culture that comes out of, even if it isn’t wholly part of, the US.

From dress to language to attitudes and even to relationships, the natural and spontaneous is seen as being replaced by carefully cultivated postures, and the deliberate use of ‘in’ phrases and words.

When the grasp of that slippery but hip language, English, is at best rocky, it can lead to a reaction away from it all, because the key to that synthetic world is English, or what passes for English in the lifestyles aggressively touted by television and Western — that is, Hollywood — films.

So what the youth see as fashionable, and yet is not fully within their grasp, creates a sense of insecurity. And insecurity is only one step away from apprehension and fear. And fear, as Graham Greene says, is indivisible from hate, because fear humiliates.

It would be inevitable, then, for a good many of the youth to retreat to, or take refuge in, the traditional. This is fine, but in a world where the ‘other’ is seen all around you from thousands of television screens, that refuge may move to hatred and to an aggressive adherence to traditional values that then degenerates into mindless postures of violence, like Operation Majnu in Meerut.

Security is commonly sought through a variety of means: through religion, cultural forms, and political systems and structures. It can well be that these overlap and melt into one another. Power expressed in traditional terms with a cultural and religious overlay is then a kind of elixir that could well be seen as a counter to the other, vociferous lifestyle that virtually drowns out everything else.

And again, not surprisingly, this is not something that need be loudly expressed. There need be no strutting about in or parading of one’s ‘traditional’ or ‘ethnic-and-therefore-valuable’ postures. It is a personal refuge, and a personalised secure world, evident only when searching surveys of the kind conducted by HT/CNN-IBN reveal their existence.

All this is not merely a set of interesting suppositions. It can have a hidden menace because it draws a great deal of strength from dislike, which is only a step away from hatred.

We are witnessing what hatred is doing within our country and in other countries. It would be a sad day if a return to one’s roots is made possible only by fear and hatred. That can only bring about a destruction of whatever society is emerging here.

The new synthetic culture is unpleasant, but it must not be allowed to breed a retreat into anger and hatred. That is the fear of some of us who are now old, and have only one cherished desire left, that the world we live in becomes a happier and more secure place as our time to leave it draws near.

It may well be that these are fanciful fears, that none of these things will happen, that we will progress to an entirely westernised television-driven world with no hiccups of any kind.

But surveys like ‘The State of the Nation’ do leave one disturbed, and even more so because one is not surprised. Somehow, one knew this was coming. One only didn’t know that neo-conservatism had spread to this extent among the young.