Mimic man – Urban India is an 'uncivilisation' wearing the disguise of modernity
He looked like a poster boy for 21st century, cosmopolitan urban India: in his mid-20s; wearing designer labels — Ray Ban, Polo, Reebok — from head to toe; hair jelled in stylish spikes. And he was elbowing and pushing and shoving to get ahead in the Delhi airport queue in which his co-passengers were standing.
The young man wasn't being consciously aggressive and rude. For him, what he was doing was normal and natural behaviour; there was nothing wrong with it. And it struck me that the young man, wearing the outward trappings of international designer labels, was a walking — or rather, shoving and jostling — example of almost everything that is wrong with urban India: it has borrowed the outward symbols of global modernity without understanding and internalising the foundations of basic civic sense and social behaviour of which these are just the external tokens.
V S Naipaul mocked The Mimic Men, the 'brown saheb' Indians who after Independence stepped into the shoes of their former British rulers and imitated their ways in style of dress and speech. But as comically pathetic as Naipaul's puppet people were, they at least tried to observe the codes of conduct — however inappropriate they may have been in the context of an independent India — of their colonial mentors.
The mimic Indians of today slavishly follow international trends in clothes and fashions with little or no appreciation or understanding of the social norms, the civic dos and don'ts that these outward manifestations represent. Like standing in an orderly queue without elbowing people aside to get ahead. Like learning to control your bladder till you find a toilet and not pee in full public sight. Like observing traffic rules while driving and not flying into a literally murderous road rage at the slightest provocation. Like not seeing every young, unaccompanied woman as a potential target for unsolicited and unwanted sexual advances.
India's urban landscape mirrors its mimic inhabitants. The so-called 'modern' Indian city is a village masquerading as a metropolis. Air-conditioned malls playing muzak and luxury apartment blocks with exotic names like Manhattan Heights and Malibu Towers, with laundry hanging out to dry from every balcony, cluster cheek by jowl with festering slums where pigs root about in stinking piles of garbage and people defecate in the open for lack of basic sanitary facilities.
Our cities boast state-of-the-art Metro systems, as well as travellers who have never been taught — or will never learn? — the fundamental discipline of allowing disembarking passengers to first get off before trying to barge their own way inside. We build multi-crore highways and expressways, without any footbridge or safe pedestrian crossing so that several hundred fatalities occur each year with people being run over by speeding vehicles, and nothing ever gets done about it. When you have a population of 1.2 billion, and growing, what's a few hundred deaths a year?
India mimics the modern world of space-age technology while khap panchayats routinely and with impunity order 'honour' killings and brides are burnt alive in everyday cases of 'dowry deaths'.
Mimicry of all that might be called modern? It's more than that. It's a mockery of civilisation, ancient or modern.
Mimic man – Urban India is an 'uncivilisation' wearing the disguise of modernity | Times of India Blogs
