Let me start by sharing 3 anecdotes. The first is something I heard from a colleague of mine. This colleague is also someone I consider a good friend and I respect his opinions and observations. The anecdote goes thus.
My friend is a Manager and leads a team 60 to 70 strong. Many of his team interact and report directly to clients. One such member of his team put in her papers. While discussing the reasons for her resignation, she said that the pressure of work was too much and the client she was working with had too many demands in too short a duration. She simply could not keep up and the client could not understand the same. The client was not Indian, she was from a European nation.
My friend made a suggestion to the lady who had put in her papers. He suggested that she start saying “NO” to any work she could not do at a given time. She was also told to give exact timelines about when she could take up anything new and tell the client how long the existing work would take. This included the delays due to personal responsibilities. She could do this without any worry as she was on the notice period and had 90 days to experiment with this new way of working. Additionally, my friend, the manager, would protect her from any blow-back. In simple terms, he told his teammate to stop saying “YES” to everything the client asked for; specifically on the timelines she expected.
The client had no problem at all with the lady saying “NO” many a time and accepted the timelines she was provided based on realistic expectations. The lady took back her resignation and continued working for the team. At the risk of sounding racist, here is an additional detail. The client was White.
This is a common problem when Indians work with Europeans (and likely other cultures as well). Indians, especially the ones that work in salaried jobs are raised to be averse, if not afraid, to say “No”. One is raised at home, at school, at work and society in general to be ashamed to say “No”. Saying “No” when one is asked “Do you know this/how to do this?” or “Can you do this (or within a given time)”? is anathema. One assumes that it is a shame to not know something and there will be adverse consequences career-wise if one cannot do everything, even if this means always being overworked.
So, when the ability to say “NO” is realized and experienced, it is a wondrous experience, even cathartic! In reality, saying “No” is not a big deal and most people, including clients have no problem being told “No”. It is just a start to new direction in a conversation. But for many Indians, letting go of old conditioning and changing the mind-set to be able to say “No” is a very big deal. And it is a matter of pride to have made the mind-set switch that makes “No” a commonplace answer. This is especially true when the person to whom “No” is said is a foreigner, and even more so, if the foreigner is White.
Now consider the next anecdote. A close friend of mine and a fellow black belt in the Bujinkan system has been running his own company (“start-up”) for about 10 years now. A fellow martial artist from France was in India training with us, some 7 years ago. This Frenchman decided to intern with my friend’s company.
One day a visitor made his way to their office for the first time. This visitor had not met anyone in my friend’s office earlier. On that day both my friend and the Frenchman were at the office, apart from other regular staff. I need to add here, the Frenchman, is White. The first person the visitor decided to approach for queries and instructions was the Frenchman.
It is by default assumed that one who is White is the boss. If not, the White is at least someone who knows better, if not best, in any given situation. This again comes as no surprise to many of us. Being a country with a history of colonization, even though most of us are born long after the British left, this behaviour is obvious and expected.
This though is changing, as evidenced in the first anecdote, with greater interaction with people from around the world and due to greater travel by Indians. The change again is in the mind-set. This change has made many Indians surer of themselves and assertive with respect to their ideas, opinions and experiences.
Now for the third anecdote. Back when I started training the Bujinkan two decades ago, we had a rule while training with women. We could not hit women or hurt them. We trained to take their balance with no force and with effective movement. This rule was used, as far as I know, in a few other countries in Europe, but most other dojos from outside India did not have this rule and I recall some women practitioners from abroad being surprised by this rule we practiced.
The rule was completely valid in the Indian context. The number of women practicing the martial arts was small in India back then (so was that of men, but this was more pronounced in the case of women). The number of both men and women practicing the martial arts has increased in the last 2 decades, proportionally. Back then, even the women who did train were a lot more concerned about physical pain and felt vulnerable. So, to create a safe environment, only once a women attained a black belt could she choose to ask men to hit, but with lower power if necessary. Women could gradually increase the intensity and speed of the attacks they encountered during training.
This notion of all women being vulnerable in the dojo has changed. The female practitioners who have started at our dojo more recently seem to not feel vulnerable, or at least feel a lot less so than years ago. The young women who have joined us recently are not worried about physical pain and train just like the men. One of them even said that she expects to feel pain and overcome it with time! This is a marked change. It is not that they are not worried anymore, they are a lot more comfortable communicating how they would like to train. They are also far more certain of their own abilities and the reasons for their training in the dojo.
While this is true of young women, we have a fellow budoka who is in her fifties and started training a couple of years ago. Even she seems a lot more comfortable with pain, to the extent of coming back to class after recovering from a fractured leg. So, the self-confidence and self-awareness of practitioners, specifically women, has changed and is becoming similar to those of women from other parts of the world.
All the 3 anecdotes above, in my opinion, demonstrate the same thing. Indians and therefore India is a much-changed nation over the course of the last decade and a half, thanks to much greater interaction with the rest of the world, increasing income levels and to a large extent, the internet revealing new (and old) ideas that were not widespread earlier.
Indians are now a lot more confident and assertive. This awareness of the newfound confidence and assertiveness and the fact that they can be that way and earn respect across the world is a vitally important aspect in the lives of many Indians. Perhaps this was always true about Indians and the respect they earned across the world, but the number of Indians who are aware of this is vastly greater of late, thanks to various media platforms. This change is lovingly acknowledged at all levels of social interaction – at work, in the family, among friends and any other that one can think of.
Granted, all of this is anecdotal experience, and the sample size is small. The concurrence about these opinions of mine is also from the set of people I interact with regularly at work, in the family and in the dojo, and the set of friends I interact with often. This is not a large number and could be the experience and opinion set of a bubble or an echo chamber. But considering that this is being spoken of at a national level on various fora, I opine that it is a larger trend. I would be glad to be proved wrong.
With this introduction, I would say that one major “REAL ISSUE” for many Indians was the need to have self-confidence and develop the traits in life that lead to the same. The ability to be assertive, to say “NO” and to in general be confident of oneself and one’s background and identity is a HUGE positive and fulfillment of a desire for Indians. And if a government is seen to either facilitate or help improve the development of the mind-set needed for self-confidence, then that government will be seen to have done a great deal for the people, or at least to the section of society that feels an improvement in its mind-set. If this section is large enough, it is likely to sway the result of elections.
Confidence is a part of one’s identity. Self-Confidence, despite a background that is not a driver of confidence is an even greater and cherished part of one’s identity. And this mingles with the other aspects of what defines an identity, which could include religion, heritage, traditions, community affiliations, family background, employment, hobbies, life experience, education, wealth, prosperity, skill sets (including physical abilities) and any other one can think of.
Any aspect of identity that gets enhanced due to government actions, due to any of the various affiliations of an individual, will boost the chances of that individual voting for the government. This leads us to yet another aspect we see in India, considering that it is election season.
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We hear a phrase a lot these days on the “News” on Television, in all the English news channels in India. This phrase is, “to distract from the real issues”. This phrase is used by many from the opposition political parties and also from people inclined to be aligned with that is referred to as the “leftists”. These individuals use this phrase mainly when they refer to the various temple-mosque or conversion related issues that are high in the mind space of Indians. Consider the reactions to the inauguration of the temple at Ayodhya or the telecast to “The Kerala Story” on Doordarshan to get an idea of the same.
A modified photo of a news story on TV on April 17, 2024. This day was Rama Navami, a major festival, in 2024. On this day, there was a lot of talk about the “Surya Tilak” on the vigraha/murthy (statue in a simplified sense) of Lord Ram Lalla in the new temple at Ayodhya. As expected, when this was a major new item, the statement that highlighting this event was a “diversion” from “real” issues was making rounds as well.
They claim that the current central government is not improving the quality of life of Indians and to distract from this fact they resort to polarizing Hindus from followers of the Abrahamic faiths by making them want a restoration of old temples as against a “better quality of life”.
Now, this makes one ask, what is a “real issue”? In my opinion, a real issue is anything that a voter thinks the government should do for her or him if they are to expect her or him to vote for them (either as a repeat vote or for the first time). That said, one needs to know what any voter wants. When a large enough number of voters want something, that becomes an important issue for the government or a government wannabe to address to the satisfaction of the maximum number of voters wanting the same.
A large number of voters want better employment opportunities, better health care, education that can help aspiration fructification. There are also still many in our country who would want easier access to cooking fuel, shelter, clean water, good roads and healthy meals. Thus, these are “real issues”, no doubt there. Now consider the issue of access to and potential reclamation of temples, or at least the Gyanvapi mosque and Shahi Idgah in Kashi and Mathura respectively. Are these “real issues” or not? Let’s attempt a break down.
There is definitely a large section of the population in our country which has access to good quality food, water, shelter, roads, healthcare, education and employment opportunities. This is not to say that they do not aspire for cheaper healthcare or better roads, better education and better paying employment opportunities. They certainly do, but they are not deprived of any of these at the current moment. Of course, inflation is a problem for this set of citizens as well and they do wish for it to be controlled. But they also know that they are better off compared to crores of others. They also realize that inflation in its current form is a global problem the government can only do so much about. They also realize that the government is trying and doing things for the better, albeit slower than what can be desired and not to the expected levels. This same holds true for the problem of youth underemployment. But in my personal opinion, every government in our country has improved upon its predecessors and hence we are definitely progressing.
This progress has improved the lives of crores over time, while crores more are yet to be beneficiaries at the same level as the rest. Those that have been beneficiaries of reasonably good governance over the last several decades know that, and with that knowledge their definition of “issues” have also changed.
If one has a country to live in where one’s life and livelihood are not under threat of extinction and one can lead a life without active government support, then one of the things citizens might wish for is pride in their own country and in themselves. Pride in one’s country is not uniformly defined. For several communities that that have existed for millennia longer that the modern nation of India, pride in the nation extends to its civilizational history and not just to the republic and its supposed values.
So, these people might feel that they have what is needed for a good life and now aspire for civilizational pride by having a temple where it is known that an external aggressor built a place of prayer to humiliate those that revered the temple. Does this then not become a “real issue”? If snob value can be an attribute of a brand, why can yearning for pride in civilizational history not be one? Is this need to have pride in one’s culture/civilization not an extension of one wanting to be self-confident and assertive? I would opine that it is.
Are psychological or emotive desires not real issues? If yes, then this Gyanvapi issue is a real issue and there is no distraction at play. The distraction might be to underplay the emotive desires of an electorate. A clever government would obviously identify an emotive need that other governments chose to not identify and tap into it as a means to achieve adulation from citizenry, and hence electoral success.
Now, if this is a real issue as suggested above, what does that say about those saying this is “distraction from real issues”? Are they not saying that until everyone in our country has the same standard of living, those that have a good standard of living currently should put all their aspirations on hold until those whose lives are not as good as their own match what they currently have? Is this anything more than clumsy ideology considering that an “issue” might have to be on hold for years? They are saying, “your desire is not a real issue because there are other issues that we consider as real issues, and you should listen to us”. They are also saying that many people need to consider as real issues, only those that are issues of others and those less unfortunate, irrespective of what they consider as real issues for themselves.
In summary, they are saying they know better, and many people do not. Also, this line of thinking means that many people should not want what they do because others have less. So, should they be happy with what they have for indeterminate times? And be at risk of being shamed, as what they want do not constitute “real issues”? It certainly seems so. This leads me to the last part of the aspects I wanted to share.
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There were two interviews recently on the YouTube channel “Mojo Story”, run by the well-known journalist Barkha Dutt. One was with journalist Neerja Chowdhary in early January 2024 and another was with yet another journalist, Vir Sanghvi in late February 2024. I am sharing links to both below.
The two interviews show diverging views about the current Prime Minister of India, Narendra Modi. Vir Sanghvi agrees that one major plus point attributed to PM Modi is that he has improved India’s stature on the global stage. This extends to Indians being seen with greater respect abroad and Indians at home feeling more confident due to the same. But Mr. Sanghvi also ridicules this idea saying nothing much has changed abroad, meaning Indians were respected earlier as well and that the stature of India while it has improved has not changed greatly. He is an experienced journalist, and his observations could be right. But this does not take away from the fact that the mind-set among many Indians has changed and they might just be seeing the respect more clearly and hankering for more, and pondering actions to get the same.
Ms. Chowdhary expands on the idea of the change in the mind-set of many Indians. In the interview she shares her experience and states that specifically Hindus are seeing a resurgence in cultural pride. This is seen as an extension of confidence and greater aspirations. There is also no diffidence or guilt about being Hindu and the purported weaknesses with their religion among those who identify as Hindu. Ms. Chowdhary shares how she has seen the number of devout visitors in Kashi increasing manifold and at the same time being younger, indicating a hunger to connect with the ancient culture of the land.
She goes on to say that the phenomenon of PM Modi is not yet understood well in India. She also states that she is not sure if the consistent popularity and approval of PM Modi is a consequence of a changing India or if the change in India is a consequence of the NDA Government led by PM Modi. The change in India she refers to, as I understand it, is related to the aspirations and change in mind-set that we discussed earlier, apart from just increasing disposable incomes and awareness of one’s standing in the world.
I personally think that election of PM Modi is a reflection of the changing mind-set in India and not the other way around. The increasing number of people sharing the mind-set in a short duration of a decade might be partly attributable to the Government, but not its initial rise to power and continuing popularity. I believe that there is a large enough section of the electorate in India whose basic physical needs are met and now the psychological/emotive needs of cultural affinity and pride in one’s civilization, history and identity is what is desired. The culture and narrative debates in India on all media platforms likely fuels this desire to greater urgency than in the past.
The points in the above few paragraphs, in my understanding, explain why the need to retell Indian history and highlight the positives of the same are now very REAL issues. They are not just “distractions” as some sections of the media and others would like everyone to agree.
I am currently reading a book titled “Sword and Soul” by Hindol Sengupta**, the link to which is seen below. The book is about the history of and potential near future of Political Hinduism. I am only a third of the way through the book. The author walks the journey of political Hinduism from roughly the time of the Company Raj, through the time Ananda Math was written through Veer Savarkar, the Revolutionary movement and the interaction of all of these with the INC of old. Based on what I am reading, it seems that the yearning for civilizational pride that is seen and spoken of today is pretty much the same as that expressed over the last 125 years. It also seems that this yearning was suppressed post-independence for some five decades and then it came back with renewed vigour, with improving circumstances of a considerable section of Indian citizens. This further lends credence to the fact that any issue related to identity, pride in the same and the mind-set change of a people will likely always be a REAL ISSUE, until it is fully satisfied.
**
In a previous article, I had shared some thoughts on the various opinions of western content creators on YouTube, regarding the practice and effectiveness of different martial art forms. The link to the article is seen in the notes below*. One common theme among a section of martial artists is that one should focus on training ONLY fighting styles that prepare one for self defence in a modern context (they are mainly referring to western scenarios, but are not limited to the same). Some of them are disparaging with regard to traditional martial arts which focus on fighting as it existed in the past.
These opinions are absolutely correct. But, there is another side to this line of thinking. Their opinions assume that everyone who trains the martial arts, does so ONLY to learn self defence. In other words, their opinions regarding the reason for training is ONLY physical. This again is a valid assumption for a large section of practitioners of the martial arts. To be fair some of the content creators I am referring to only have a problem with martial artists who claim to be teaching self defence without actually testing the same in a tough simulation.
There could however be several other reasons for people to train the martial arts. In the article I wrote I came up with some 16 reasons, some of which had nothing to do with physicality of any sort. Some of these involved reasons of recreation, meditative attributes of the martial arts, self-development and the like. These are reasons that are PSYCHOLOGICAL and not really physical, despite have a physical component to the training.
This divergence in opinion for the reasons of training the martial arts is exactly like the Leftists suggesting that any “real issue” has to do with the physical needs of citizens alone, and anything that has to do with matters of cultural confidence or civilizational pride is a distraction from the real issues they define. Could this partly be due to the lesser focus in India on matters of mental health? Or is there a lack of focus on mental health due to psychological needs not being considered real? I do not have an answer; perhaps someone who knows can shed some light on this.
I feel that it is precisely because the current government of India has a focus on both the physical and psychological needs of the electorate that they continue to enjoy a high rate of approval. The physical needs of the citizens are addressed in the form of the free rations, better toilets, access to cooking gas, electricity and drinking water and the digital platforms for ease of doing business for small traders. The psychological/emotional needs are addressed in the actions on the temple building, CAA and other activities that emphasize civilizational pride and a decolonization of the Indian mind.
We live in a time when debates do not result in any change of position or opinion. In such an environment, I suppose the “real” in what one considers is a real issue is purely personal. It depends on the political leaning and convictions of every individual, and that in turn depends on the social circles one chooses and the narratives those emphasize. Perhaps the only real issue was that we considered that there was a shared reality which everyone could agree on. There are likely as many “REAL ISSUES” as there are people. Perhaps this need for a “real” and personal reality is what led to there being 300 versions (supposedly) of the Ramayana, each of which are likely undergoing personalization with every reading and retelling.
Notes:
Mundane Budo 
Very true.The issues are multiple and need to be addressed.
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