I saw an article that states that Indians are traders and that the recent incident of the fictitious auctioning of Muslim women is a manifestation of that.
I disagree.
We are not traders by nature. We are clerks. Not born as such, but converted to clerkdom by the British, by design. They had the leaders and managers to run their Empire. What they needed were ‘coolies’, for the lack of a better word. Someone to implement ideas without question, carry the load, ‘do the needful’. And they used their ingenuity to train Indians to be so, for around 200 years, ending with where we find ourselves today, unable (or perhaps unwilling) to shake off the hangover.
Look around you. There was a time when the ultimate Maharashtrian middle-class dream (I can say this with confidence, but I am presuming the same existed across the nation) was to be a low-level cog in the wheel, a clerk, and perhaps retire as the ‘Head Clerk’ in a bank, or a British-run company, or a government organisation. We, and I speak solely of the Maharashtrian Brahmins here (from experience), never wanted anything more than a stable job with a tough but fair boss, not having to use our initiative or leadership skills, but only our limited education in the conduct of an activity so mundane and boring that only those dead inside would look forward to doing it for a living. As I stated, I think the Bengalis, the Tamilians, and the UP Brahmins were similar in their aspirations, if such meagre objectives in life were to be given such lofty nomenclature.
It’s 2022, 75 years from our independence from the colonial yoke. But nothing has changed inside our minds. Much.
Today, look at the so-called IT superpower we have become. Visit the IT assembly line in any of the marquee companies: Infosys, TCS, Wipro, whatchamacallit, and you will see the exact same sight as once you saw in banks: a row of servile, educated, high-caste people who are doing work so repetitive and banally tedious, monotonous, and unimaginative that Sisyphus would pity them. Ditto Amazon. Or Facebook. Or any other tech giant that operates out of India and employs Indians. All major design and creative decisions are taken outside India. And implemented with the Indian mechanical Turks here. Zero innovation. Zero initiative. Zero leadership. Zero spark. Indeed, zero life.
Our so-called IIT-IIM graduates, our spelling-bee winners, our Maths Olympiad medalists, our prodigies, all of them have but one goal: to be a modern-day clerk in a modern-day business. Unsurprisingly, it is for these very skills that some of them are chosen as CEOs and Presidents of foreign-run companies, a source of reflected pride for our patriotic citizens. The truth is that even if some of these international CEOs are not simply ‘Head Clerks’ in every way described above, they are exceptions to the rule and not the norm. Our wild celebration on their behalf belies the fact that they are not there because they are Indians, and that their Indianness is incidental to their success. Unless they are simply clerks kicked upstairs because they are stable, non-threatening, and risk-averse, every quality a Head Clerk requires to reach their station, and indeed retire from it. With a gold-plated (not real gold, just plated) wristwatch and a pension. Sort of.
Coming back to the incident of IIT graduates threatening rape on an infant or creating an app to auction Muslim celebrities, my contention is that they did not do this because they are steeped in the trader mentality of buying low and selling high. That is giving them too much credit, and belittling the real traders who changed (and created) the world as we know it today. These people are clerks, who know how to enliven their mundane, boring lives by lashing out, and that too at imaginary targets. Just like how low-level clerks in the pre-independence era would get together in the office canteen over cups of lukewarm tea (brought to them by the lower-caste peon whose name they never seemed to remember) and boast to each other how they told their ‘sahib‘ off, when in reality, they’d shit their pants if their English boss were to as much as look at them with a raised eyebrow.
That’s their level. Let us not needlessly assign quasi-heroic intent to them by calling them traders. Traders take risks, put their lives and livelihoods in danger, and bet on uncertainty to make a profit. Clerks, on the other hand, depend purely on the benevolence of their superior to navigate and survive their careers, and the punching down the oppressed and the persecuted to lead a life they can claim as meaningful.
We are, at the end of the day, a country of clerks. Created by the British but at the end of the day, choosing, and even proud, to stay the way we have now been conditioned and trained.
The sooner we eradicate it and consign it to the dustbin of history, the quicker will our society evolve to awaken to take its rightful place in the civilised world. Alas, our leaders, instead of showing us how to rid ourselves of this servile, infantilising, and regressive mentality, instead of rising above it and leading us out of this morass we have inherited from the British system of extractive governance, instead of revamping our society to reflect what it ought to be, what it has the potential of being, are pulling us backwards into what they think was the glorious past, the very past that led us to the pitiful state we find ourselves in, stealing code from Github and creating marketplaces for fictitious auctions of minority women. THAT’s what our best young talent from our best institutions is doing. Not creating world-beating products and services. Not leading the world from darkness to light. Not taking initiative in solving the pressing problems that plague humanity. Creating fantasy marketplaces for Muslim women.
When history will record this era, what will it say about our society? What will it say about us? This. This is our legacy. This is how our great-grandchildren will remember the early 2000s. What can be more tragic than that?
P.S: I guess now we all know where this perplexing insistence by every middle-class Indian for a ‘benevolent dictator’ comes from. The clerk mentality that yearns for a tough but fair boss, someone so high up in station that it is physically, practically, morally, emotionally, financially, and spiritually impossible to reach his position, viz., a white man (and in the absence of which, royalty, which treats us like shit, dresses well, travels well, eats well, lives luxuriously, and is visibly better off than us mortals who cannot even dream of aspiring to it).
