You and I

Our bond is almost umbilical. You are the first one I touch when I reach the place I call home. You are the soul in my words, the heart with which I feel my way in foreign spaces. My rose-tinted glasses through which privilege is lovelier, and the mirror that reflects my most helpless self. Anchor and wings, the lodestone to which I return every time I seek my roots.

You, whom I cannot judge with objective vision. When someone lifts a finger to you I must need explain how you became this way. Excuse her, she is old and troubled. If you had been through a past like hers you wouldn't know what to do either. I watch children cast words like stones at you. They are only just learning the depths of words like culture and history. They are idealistic enough to believe there are simple solutions. Each time they choose a label I hasten, in my mind, to explain.

Their word for the day is 'Slavery'. I have walked past enough such 'slaves' on my way to school every day, to know what they're talking about. I agree, conditions are inhuman and children should be in school. It isn't fair. But I cringe at the word 'slave', the way they might if you termed them 'cheat'. The rules are simple, and the same for both. Pay your debts. Play fair. Be kind to your fellow human being. Families stick together. Work hard.

Does the fact that they don't abide by some rules make it more acceptable that you disregard others? No. But who are they to cast words at you, rise up in arms against the crimes they commit themselves? Whether it is a credit card or a loan for 'do bigha zameen', a debt is a debt. Being irresponsible is a choice. How does a country where debt collectors are 'just doing their job' decide that other, possibly more 'useful' forms of debt collection are unacceptable?

Armchair activism is bad enough without the complication of hypocrisy. Sitting at a laptop in a climate-controlled room, flinging labels around is just the click of a few keys. How do they take a heterogenous population of millions and click-clack fit them into the five slots of a homogenous monotheist race? Prejudice and the caste system are bad, they say. Even as they approve racial profiling and draw lines of security and acceptability in their own states. Where are the solutions?

I sit here and watch signs of you in them, and them in you. You who profiled and slotted people centuries ago. You who grew massive enough to evolve culture without thinking about religion and science, creationism and the conflicts of modernity with tradition. They're not even trying to fit the pieces together. The evolution of culture is simple enough- it has little to do with art and 'higher thought', and much more to do with our primitive instincts to keep groups of people insular. How much easier to accept the instinct and learn to live with it, than fight and question cellular urges.

And after my confused attempts to explain the evolution of a society and a country, I still turn to you for answers. I know there are no simple solutions, so I look for the isolated instances. Success stories and positivity, the empowerment of one woman in one village. One laborer's child who owns a mansion like the one across the street from where I live now. One man who sets up a trust fund for his workers after his million-dollar hotel is ripped apart by terrorists. The students that stood by their classmate through medical school after she was raped on the streets of Delhi.

I search your depths for this growing quorum of hope and change to justify my love for you. With a child's faith, I look to your heart and ignore the cracks that mar the surface.

You who work miracles in my life. You whom I love without completely understanding. You are in my every cell, every thought. Infatuation is satiated by a poem, obsession can be burnt out in a book or two. But you, you are the one I turn to when I am filled with words, and they are still never enough. If I could only write about one subject all my life, it would be you. And you I never have the right words to describe. Eternal muse, brimming with words of every imagination, every emotion. I think that is why they use the word 'Motherland'.