Indian Dream

I have been a keen reader of Kanti Bajpai’s Saturday columns in the Times of India. Simple and elegantly worded, they pack deep and complex thoughts with an amazing facileness that appeal even to the politically uninitiated minds. The latest Saturday Times has his article on Indian Mind. He defines Indian Dream as aspiring for modernity, moderation, a middle class income and well managed society.

For the first time, I felt a vague sense of the writer being and yet not being fully with the Indian dreamer. To capture the whole of Indian dream is like trying to catch a leviathan in a fly swatter. India is made of many Indias –not just in geographical terms, but in terms of class, caste, religion, faith, language, culture, customs etc, all further divided by groups with access and non-access to education and employment. It is not possible that each group has a dream of its own which could be collectively harnessed to make for a single Indian dream as Kanti Bajpai has described it.

Everyone has a dream irrespective of which group s/he belongs to. Aristotle said “Hope is a waking dream”.  If we give up dreaming, we give up hope, the only thing that keeps us going. The Biblical Proverb says: “Hope deferred makes the heart sick, but a dream fulfilled is a tree of life. In our own times, we have the famous lines of Abba’s lyric ,

                                                            I have a dream

                                                       a song to sing,

                                                       a fantasy to help me through reality

                                                       When I know the time is right for me
                                                        I'll cross the stream, I have a dream.

This is true of all of us and today our dreams are drawn between modernity and tradition and neo-modernity. The first two (tradition and modernity) represent a generational clash. Thanks to modern medicine and living standards, longevity has moved slowly up on the life-scale and the dreams of the older generation are at variance with those of the younger generation. The former dreams of the older values that have lost their sanctity in many ways, while the latter dreams of a Brave New World where material values matter most. The pervasive electronic media and the ubiquitous Bollywood have also brought to the fore the difference in the dreams of the rural youth and the urban youth, though at the core both aspire for wealth and a great style of living. The difference is only in the means to achieve their respective dreams. Then comes the middleclass aspiration that just does not stop with what Kanti Bajpai describes as increase in middle class income. The middle class, more than at any other time today dreams big of keeping with the Joneses and for that any small rise in its income is inadequate. This is the influence of the Bollywood which portrays the success story of one of their class rising up the social ladder to become a billionaire. The new hero is no longer the angry young man of the ‘70s of the previous century, but the new successful brash man from the erstwhile salaried middle class who gives up all the middle class values to realize his dream of one among the moneyed class. If he does not have the money to wear branded shirts and trousers, he will go for the fake ones, hoping to shrug off the class distinction though he could never cultivate the e’lan and verve of the manor born class. He dreams like his celluloid heroes to escape and cope with harsh reality. It is no exaggeration to say that the famous middle class morality that Alfred Doolittle was wary of in Bernard Shaw’s Pygmalion is cultivated by our aspiring middle class to pretend to be highbrows and discard the middlebrows tag.  But the truth is the dream of today’s middle class to be highbrow is far from realizable. The middle class can be best described in the words of Russell Lynes, the American art historian, who wrote:  “The highbrows would like, to eliminate the middlebrows and devise a society that would approximate an intellectual feudal system, in which the lowbrows do the work and create folk arts, and the highbrows do the thinking and create fine arts. By contrast, the pesky “middlebrows” don’t care about “pure, complimentary pursuits”; they swap vocational significance for “money, fame, power or prestige.” It is no wonder why we have become notorious as a corrupt nation of bribe givers and bribe takers.

Those belonging to the lower middle class and the poorer class also dream big. The Television reality shows make it possible for them to dream of big money by their standards. This may not be of millions and billions but a few lakhs and sometimes they dream of becoming crorepathis. They do not ever think how many of them can really realize their dream, but then reality shows like India Got Talent  and Kaun Banega Crorepathi  and other Music and Dance competitions fill them with hope that they may be the lucky dreamers.  Again the dream is all about :

Money, money, money
 Must be funny
In the rich man's world
Money, money, money
Always sunny
In the rich man's world
Aha-ahaaa
All the things I could do
If I had a little money
It's a rich man's world (Abba)

To become insta-rich is the dream of millions of Indians today without a clue to the means to realize their dream. There is nothing wrong per se to dream about wealth and high living but if one does not have the talent or the skill or the intelligence to make money, then the dream effervesces leaving behind a residue of anger, frustration, depression and criminalism.

There are some individual dreams that get realized like the American dream of the IIT and IIM graduates, the dream of  the poorest of poor like the road layers winning a talent show against all odds, the dream of a rural youth becoming a crorepathi, but these are few and far between and they are dreams that are brought to fruition by hard work and focused learning. There are many other collective dreams like a Corruption-free India, Swachch Bharat, Clean Ganga, Freedom for our women and children from the rapists and exploiters of innocence, Discipline in all our personal and professional lives, a nation free of crippling poverty, illness and illiteracy, a nation committed to religious tolerance and accommodation, a nation of World class institutions and committed to Welfare society- these are just  dreams to keep us alive and awake. 

Sholom Aleichem , the leading Jewish writer speaks of life as “a dream for the wise, a game for the fool, a comedy for the rich, a tragedy for the poor.” We must dream but should bear in mind that dreams without vision, vision without intelligence and practicability, and intelligence without commitment and service to fellow humanity will remain as dreams, making us blissfully snuggled under the covers. After all ignorance is bliss and bliss is ignorance.  If dream is the opium of life, let us dream on.