www.outlookindia.com
O
Comment
Volume LVIII, No. 11
EDITOR-IN-CHIEF Rajesh Ramachandran
GROUP CREATIVE DIRECTOR R. Prasad
DEPUTY MANAGING EDITOR Sunil Menon
CHIEF OF BUREAU Pranay Sharma
ASST EXECUTIVE EDITOR Satish Padmanabhan
POLITICAL EDITOR Bhavna Vij-Aurora
WRITERS Arindam Mukherjee, Lola Nayar,
Qaiser Mohammad Ali (Senior Associate
Editors), G.C. Shekhar (Associate Editor), Dola
Mitra (Sr Asst Editor), Pragya Singh, Prachi
Pinglay-Plumber (Asst Editors), Ajay
Sukumaran, Naseer Ganai (Senior Special
Correspondents), Ushinor Majumdar (Special
Correspondent), Arushi Bedi, Siddhartha Mishra
(Correspondents)
COPY DESK Giridhar Jha (Senior Editor),
Sreevalsan Thiyyadi, Saikat Niyogi, Satyadeep
(Sr Asst Editors), Martand Badoni (Sub Editor)
PHOTOGRAPHERS S. Rakshit (Chief Photo
Coordinator), Jitender Gupta (Deputy Photo
Editor), Tribhuvan Tiwari, Vijay Pandey (Chief
Photographers), Sandipan Chatterjee, Apoorva
Salkade, Amit Haralkar (Sr Photographers),
J.S. Adhikari (Sr Photo Researcher),
U. Suresh Kumar (Digital Library)
DESIGN Deepak Sharma (Chief Art Director),
Saji C.S. (Chief Designer), Sajith Kumar (Chief
Illustrator), Leela (Senior Designer),
Devi Prasad, Padam Gupta (Sr DTP Operators)
DIGITAL Anoop George Philip (Executive Editor),
Aniruddha Dhar (Senior Copy Editor), Thufail
P.T. (Senior Correspondent), Rama Dwivedi
(Senior Sub Editor), Saswat Anupam Singhdeo
(Correspondent), Yamini Kalra (Sub Editor),
Suraj Wadhwa (Chief Graphic Designer),
Rupesh Malviya (Video Editor)
LIBRARY Alka Gupta (Chief Librarian)
BUSINESS OFFICE
CHIEF EXECUTIVE OFFICER Indranil Roy
PUBLISHER Sandip Kumar Ghosh
VICE PRESIDENTS Abraham Uthup,
Bindu Dhawan, Meenakshi Akash,
Sam Ben Samuel, Shrutika Dewan
SR GENERAL MANAGERS Kabir Khattar (Corp),
V. Sridhar (South)
GENERAL MANAGERS Debabani Tagore,
Sasidharan Kollery, Shashank Dixit,
Siddhartha Chatterjee, Shailender Vohra,
Sharmistha Ghosh
ASSISTANT GENERAL MANAGER
Diwan Singh Bisht
CHIEF MANAGER Shekhar Kumar Pandey
MANAGERS Shekhar Suvarana, Sudha Sharma
CIRCULATION & SUBSCRIPTION Raj Kumar
Mitra, Anindya Banerjee, G. Ramesh (South),
Vinod Kumar (North), Arun Kumar Jha (East)
DIGITAL Amit Mishra
HEAD OFFICE
AB-10, S.J. Enclave, New Delhi - 110 029
Tel: 011-33505500; Fax: 26191420
Customer care helpline: 011-33505533,
33505500
e-mail: [email protected]
For editorial queries: [email protected]
For subscription helpline:
[email protected]
OTHER OFFICES
MUMBAI Tel: 022-33545000; Fax: 33545100
CALCUTTA Tel: 033 46004506; Fax: 033 46004506
CHENNAI Tel: 42615224, 42615225; Fax: 42615095
BANGALORE Tel: 080-43715021
Printed and published by Indranil Roy on
behalf of Outlook Publishing (India) Pvt. Ltd.
Editor: Rajesh Ramachandran. Printed at
International Print-O-Pac Ltd, C 4-C 11,
Phase-II, Noida and published from AB-10,
S.J. Enclave, New Delhi-110 029
Published for the week of March 13-19, 2018
Released on March 10, 2018
Total no. of pages 76, Including Covers
Concussion
I
N this 2015 Hollywood thriller on Chronic Traumatic Encephalopathy caused
by concussions in the football field, Will Smith, playing the neuropathologist
Dr Bennet Omalu, tells his future wife that as a migrant he picked up a role
model, a dignified, balding White man, and faked his attitude. “Need is not
weak. Need is need. You have to be the best version of yourself. If you don’t
know what that is, you pick something and fake it,” says Omalu in the movie.
Migrants or otherwise, isn’t that what we do all the time: picking up someone and
trying to be him or her, faking it all the time. But unlike in the movie, in real life,
the faking happens not to present the best or the ideal version. We fake it to ape
successful versions. In corrupt, queue-jumping societies like ours, the successful
ones are often those who have bent rules or made new flexible ones. I have a friend
who, after migrating to Delhi, had faked not just himself but created an entire
fictional family—father, mother and siblings—to suit his new aspirations.
In fact, whole societies do it. That is called history
writing, the favourite pastime of the Hindutva
Right. A couple of days ago, the venerable British
news agency, Reuters, broke the story on a new gov-
ernment-appointed committee of scholars to prove
that Hindus are descended from India’s first inhab-
itants, headlined, ‘By rewriting history Hindu nat
ionalists aim to assert their dominance over India.’
What are these scholars trying to prove? Why are
they so insecure? Not even Marxist historians have
ever claimed that there was any other religion in
this part of the world. Still, the committee will try
to prove relentlessly that only Hindus were the
original inhabitants of India. That suddenly reminds me, did Reuters have a simi
lar story about the movie Darkest Hour, about some whatever-nationalists’ att
empt to whitewash the sins of the British wartime Prime Minister Winston
Churchill? Many people, at least one of our columnists, believe that Churchill was
directly responsible for the Bengal famine that killed 3 million or 30 lakh Indians.
Hearing about the Oscar for Darkest Hour, Shekhar Kapur, the director of the
brilliant movie, Elizabeth, tweeted, “I hate Indians. Beastly people with a beastly
religion. The famine was their own fault for breeding like rabbits. Winston
Churchill on learning 3 million Bengalis died in the famine of 1943, largely due to
British policies. Congratulations on winning the #Oscars2018 though.” I am sure,
Reuters will sooner or later do a story on this British obsession to airbrush
Churchill to remove his racism and bigotry.
But there are reasons to believe that Churchill could have been right when he
called us beasts and our religion beastly. Who else will burn to death a weaker
neighbour, just because he belongs to another caste? Soon after Holi, the festival
of colours and drunkenness, there were reports of two murders of Dalits from
Rajasthan. There was a picture of a roasted human form getting circulated on
WhatsApp two days ago. Yet, we invoke Gandhi and claim that we are non-violent;
we build statues for Ambedkar to claim that we are inclusive. We are none of this,
let us admit it, we are merely faking it. As a society we know that we are beasts. We
try to act like human beings. But when nobody is watching we burn and rape and
wave young girls’ entrails wrapped around an iron rod. Will we ever prove Church-
ill wrong? I doubt it.
Rajesh Ramachandran
19 March 2018 OUTLOOK 3