The Lessons of Mumbai
Friday, February 6th, 2009It’s not that individual Indians aren’t kind, generous and wonderful friends, they are. It’s that the society as a whole is oblivious to the horrific ramifications of century-old practices of karma, the caste system and the reality that the depth of skin color identifies others as inferior or superior. On some level, it’s the same story worldwide practiced with different cultural twists.
While we were horrified by the Mumbai bombings, we weren’t surprised. Having lived there for two years, we watched the continued escalation of violence by Hindu fundamentalists against Muslims.
India touts interreligious respect as a national way of life, just as they do the Madison Avenue hype that India is the IT center of the world when it isn’t.
India is a country of beauty and indescribable horrors. It suffers from a deteriorated infrastructure, the highest level of infant and maternal mortality, the murder or abortion of female babies because families of daughters are expected to kneel to the whims of the grooms’ families by paying outrageous dowries or risk having their daughters burned alive, malnutrition, and horrendous graft and corruption.
The long, dehumanizing occupation by Great Britain left them so scared that rather than collectively being the kind gentle people they are individually, a false pride defined as power, wealth and security (acquired at any cost, including murder) boils not beneath, but steams into the culture.
Rather than projecting responsibility for the siege of Mumbai on Pakistan, India needs to stop pointing fingers and fists and look within to heal what could be healed if love, rather than hate takes a backseat.
Copyright 2009 by Jeanne M. Eck. All rights reserved. For permission to reprint or to quote extensively from this article, please contact the author at iamhappiertoknowyou.com