27 Dec Why NRIs newfound patriotism in Modi-ism is shameful
Let me start with a disclaimer. I am apolitical. No left. No right. No centre. This is about you and me…heart to heart. Possibly mind somewhere in between. If you can find yours, please plug it in.
May be I was alerted of the climate change last year, then I chose to take it like the glaciers-melting warning that come with a suffix it will not affect my generation. So when it actually began happening, I expected the tornado to weaken into a breeze soon, but instead it gathered momentum across the borders to lift all Indians abroad, too, off their feet.
Not one day have I hit the bed in the last one year, without seeing a post on how proud Modi makes us feel. So far absolutely fine. Each one of us have a right to our opinion.
But social media users have this innate audacity to rub their views into your face with ‘likes’ and ‘please read and share’ urgency as if the last boat exiting the surface of Earth is honking its departure.
Now, I am not interested in Modi’s promises as a wannabe-PM or his performance as the Premier nor his controversial past. That’s for scholars to debate, politicians to holler… and laymen to comment. Only that the men are going about laying themselves heavily on unsuspecting peers who do not give them their ears and eyes and mouths, without a care of taking along the most common of senses. And that’s a worry.
A joke on a professional WhatsApp group I am part of was the last nail in the proverbial coffin of my resolve. A lady-member cautioned, “Let’s stick to the group’s purpose”. Well said there. Kudos, my friend. Before I lifted my fingers off my mobile, she goes, “It’s sad to read things written about such a PM”. So had it being a pro-Modi post, she would not have ‘corrected’ her professional buddies?
Social media posts by Modiites scream a surreal threat. Share our views or shut up. Join us or get lost. Intolerance in the virtual world, I dare say? Jokes, caricatures, one-liners… can’t we just smile, chuckle, laugh and scroll over as we have been about so many of our own all these years?
Worse, are the posters that scream to question my patriotism – ‘I Support Narendra Modi’ posters with the tagline ‘Proud to be an Indian’! Really! Like a thermometer checking your body temperature, re-posting, sharing, liking these posters measure your patriotism index? Please!
It’s like the pride people usurp in announcing their lineage when they have no worth of their own to cling on or those lot who announce their elitism by reciting names of movers and shakers they spotted at the street corner.
It’s unsettling if you need a politician to trigger patriotism in you. And frightening to think all these years you never felt the same for your homeland. And to see the so-called educated lot thumping their chests with newfound patriotism in Modi-ism is shameful!
What do you teach you kids? We have a PM who is seen and heard now and visits us therefore, we need to be proud of our country. Damn with our history, tradition, culture, the uniqueness that have made us Indians thus far?
Don’t mix political allegiance and patriotism please!
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