Uncle, how could the whole world be asleep at India’s midnight hour? You know the earth rotates around the sun from west to east and completes one rotation in twenty four hours which we call a day.”
This was none other than my naughty US-bred nephew, Aayush, who I was trying to baptise into the Indian ethos, expressing his partial disagreement with Pandit Nehru who made a historic speech on the granting of Indian Independence on Aug 14, 1947. My nephew who is with us for a vacation could be persuaded to listen to me further only after I acknowledged his “logical” observation.
Little did I know that more was in store when I spread out before him the political map of pre and post Independence India. Waxing eloquent I said, “This is our mother India. Her feet are washed in the south by the unfathomable Indian ocean whereas her Queenly head is adorned by the majestic mountains of the great Himalayas.”
The 13-year-old cast his glance on the Indian map and raised his hand, “Tell me, uncle”, he pleaded, “If the Chinese were to glorify their homeland in the same manner as you did for the mother India, you as an Indian will feel offended, won’t you, uncle?”
Sensing my unease, Aayush turned sombre for a while. Suddenly he brightened up to enquire, “Uncle, have you been up the Himalayas? I want to conquer the Mount Everest like Edmund Hillary. Can we make it this summer?”
I was nonplussed. I was lost in thought. Why so many Indians including me never ever noticed what my nephew espied in no time. This is the age of risqué reason and laundered logic. If nationalism was the credo then, the Gen Next worships internationalism.
In what way is a mountain conquered because someone manages to reach its top? There is certainly an element in the West’s psyche that celebrates human domination, that sees man’s relations with nature as competitive and as ruling out any apperception of it as a source of harmony and well being. The Japanese climb Mount Fuji as homage to all it stands for. Any idea of “conquering” it will be regarded as cultural, aesthetic, philosophical and religious anathema.
