PRIDE!

The year 2016 has been a crazy one. Everyone will agree to that. Brexit and Trump – either of them in a year would have been enough. Both together of course was overkill! Still, there it was.

I am not going to try and find reasons for this nor am I going to spout lessons from all this -  people far better than me have tried and many shall keep trying. I, however was very intrigued by a slightly different aspect of this whole element – pride!

One of the key things in the Brexit campaign was about having pride in the UK. Not just faith that the UK could manage on its own but about pride that the UK would manage on its own. We didn’t need outsiders to tell us what to do…we were proud Britishers. I suppose, the point of making America great again was also about having pride in America.

Not that America or UK are unique in this. Pride, for example, is a very key part of India. “Garv se kaho hum… hain”…fill in any region or religion in India and I am pretty sure that slogan exists. People are exhorted to be proud of the place they are from.  And this is something I don’t quite follow. You had nothing to do with your Birth - what is there to be proud about it?

Now, I can’t speak for others but in general I think one can feel pride about something when one has actually had some role in that something coming to fruition – even if it is indirect. So, one can feel proud in one’s children’s achievements because there has been effort in bringing that child up. One can feel proud about the college one went to because there was some effort (one assumes) in getting into that college. One can perhaps feel proud of the place one works at because it took some effort to get into the organisation, in the first place and perhaps the work one has done has helped achieve that which one is proud of.

But it’s rather stretching things when one is proud of accidents of nature. Being proud of being Indian or American or whatever is like being proud of being tall or proud of the fact that you are less likely to catch malaria because of your genetic background. That’s just the way you are born – you didn’t choose it and you didn’t do anything to have it happen. I have never, for example, come across a South Asian who is ashamed of being more prone to diabetes. The logic, of course, is pretty much the same.

Not to say that the shame game does not go on – it’s just that people don’t normally get ashamed of who they are but try to make other people ashamed of  their birth. This normally comes in the form of using your birth to blame you for what your ancestors did. So, this takes the form of blaming the current crop of Britishers for the evils of colonialism, blaming 21^st century white Americans for the evils of slavery and making 21^st century Brahmins responsible for the evils of casteism. Rather stupid to my mind. There might be an argument for a societal response to some of these evils in the past but trying to blame individuals for the ills of their ancestors is never going to work very well.

What however is interesting is that while people do, quite naturally, recoil at being blamed for the actions from a few hundred years ago; they are still very happy to feel pride at that same ancestry even though they still had nothing to do with it. They are enough people who want to feel pride at the history of Britain as a maritime and colonial power but even if they are willing to accept that colonialism had its downsides they claim that they can’t be held responsible for it. Every region in India has had its past of some atrocity of some sort on another region but when  the “garv se kaho…” piece starts, no one ever thinks of “thodi si sharm bhi karlo…”

It isn’t very surprising that people want to remember the good bits and forget the bad bits – that’s natural. But when you are trying to claim ownership of a past which you had nothing to do with, it seems a bit unfair that you only want to claim ownership of the good bits.

And the fundamental point remains – what are you feeling proud of? And do you have so little to feel good about that you must search for it in things which have nothing to do with you.

Pride, of course is very closely linked to identity. Human beings seem to have the need for an identity. In reality, I feel the need is not so much about identity as it is just about the need to be part of a larger community. This is very clearly seen when one considers immigrant communities – such as Indian immigrants in the west. When the first wave of immigrants came many years ago, language was a problem for many of them. Further, within India, a lot had already grown up in communities which were regional rather than pan Indian. Hence communities in the West often grew up along linguistic and regional lines – so in London, for example go to Southall and you will find the Sikhs and Punjabi.  But, as time has passed, a more educated variety has landed up which already speaks English, at least as a second language, if not the first.  Such people can now be found in large numbers interacting with other Indians – who went to similar schools and colleges as they did and work in similar industries – and they can be found all across London, such as in Wimbledon, where I live. Their identity is  no longer Punjabi or Tamilian or Gujarati…but Indian because they can easily interact with Indians with similar upbringing. The next generation will probably not care that much for the Indian bit and have a more British identity.

But while I understand that people might need that sense of identity, what is still not clear to me is why the pride in that. Whether you view yourself as Tamilian, Indian, British Indian, or British is immaterial – that depends on your upbringing and your world view. But, on its own, it cannot and does not make you better than someone else. And if everyone understood that, we just might have a slightly more peaceful, less confrontational world. Now, that might be something for all humans to be proud of!!