Hey Ram!

A few days ago, for Republic Day, my cousin’s kid’s second-grade class teacher at a very posh school in ‘progressive’ Pune asked the students to come dressed as a ‘revolutionary’ and gave four choices to their parents: ‘Shaheed Bhagat Singh, Lokmanya Tilak, Netaji Subhash Chandra Bose, and Mahatma Godse’. When she called my mum to ask her opinion on which one her kid should go as, Maa was appalled (Maa is 73, and my cousin, around 45) and managed to convince & coax her to steer away from that last name. The little one went as Tilak, dressed in a Puneri Pagdi, proclaiming how ‘Swarajya’ was his birthright.

That is all very well. But it remains that my cousin (a well-established medical practitioner with a Master’s degree, a nice independent home in the toniest of neighbourhoods, two cars, and a couple of dogs, with regular vacations and cosmopolitan friends, all of whom grew up in independent, prosperous, even privileged surroundings with good education, exposure, and opportunity to learn and better themselves), a 0.01 percenter, if I’ve ever known one, did not, indeed for the life of her could not, see absolutely anything wrong with choice number 4, and my mother, a simple arts graduate, not really a voracious reader or debater or anything, born literally 3 years after independence, raised in poverty, and who has lived through some tough times, was horrified even by the thought of it, is an astounding, if accurate representation of the state of this nation as of this date.

Now, it is anybody’s guess whether Gandhi actually said anything as he fell on this date in 1948, seventy-six years ago at seventeen and a half minutes past five in the evening at Birla House in New Delhi, shot by the hand of India’s first terrorist, but with a bullet that represented the collective hate of a handful of bigots who weren’t trying to assassinate Gandhi as much as the very idea of India.

We wept for the Mahatma then but reassured and promised ourselves that Nathuram, and everything he stood for, did not, could not, and will not win.

Well, we were wrong. And it might be rather apt that this nation and its experiment with secularism & tolerance may have just ended with the exact same words: Hey Ram!

PSA: For those born recently, Gandhi is that old, bald, bespectacled, gently smiling chap on the multicoloured pieces of paper with numbers printed on them that you use to pay for stuff when you don’t have network connectivity. Ram, of course, you already know.

P.S.: I have been frantically called by my family to tell me it wasn’t the school teacher who gave those four options (because everyone is mortally fearful of me naming that school now and them being asked to take their child away because that innocent kid’s crazy uncle has precipitated a crisis by talking about things we shouldn’t be talking about in polite company), but those were the ones my cousin thought of herself. I wonder if that makes this better or worse. Sigh.

P.P.S.: Only those who don’t know Puneri Brahmins are shocked by this. Nathuram was considered a martyr and a great soul by them ever since he murdered an unarmed old man. It’s nothing shocking or surprising to those who know. I am amused at your ignorance, to be perfectly honest.