Not Letting Go...

The inability to let go is characteristic of the typical Indian psyche. Stories abound in feudal India about generations fighting over what seems like crushed pride. Retrospective vision sometimes makes it appear as something banal, or something which could have been settled once and be done with, or better still…let go. But this is never so, whether it is feudal India or any of its modern avatars.

N. Srinivasan cannot let go of his powerful position as the man who makes Indian cricket a daily tamasha. The game, in India, has stripped itself of all residual honour and yet continues to grab its daily share of eyeballs. Indians viewers cannot let go of a much sullied game where victories are now largely pyrrhic.  People who can turn the game of cricket management around for the better are not letting go of their silences, offering what is at best, a lip-service about the Board doing the right thing and other such.

While the Congress cannot let go of the Gandhi family, LK Advani cannot let go of the fact that today his views (about how the BJP should function and project itself ) are now dated. The elderly statesman cannot let go the fact that nobody is listening to him from his own party. The BJP in its desperation to form a Government cannot let go of their poster child Narendra Modi. On a sobering note, secular India should not let go of the fact that his name is associated with communal violence and genocide, and such a person cannot represent the notion of “India” as enshrined in its Constitution.

Arnab Goswami, Rajedep Sardesai , Barkha Dutt and their ilk cannot let go their penchant to take issues to hair splitting ends and emerge none-the-wiser, while wasting programme band-width and ignoring matters which would truly inform and galvanize the Nation.

Corporate India is no different. While Infosys cannot let go of Narayana Murthy, Narayana Murthy cannot let go of Infosys. It doesn’t need a great business analyst to understand that he had never ‘let go’ in the first place, always operating as a ghost figure.

Self-effacing “giants” in academia cannot let go of their “sacrifice”. They cannot digest the bitter truth that in their so-and-so years of teaching, the standards of academia have been dipping. Every batch is a little less interested in the subject than its predecessor, the effort put in is that much less on work and the caliber that much more blunted. But colleges cannot let go the revenue brought in by admitting a new batch no matter what the current crop’s standard is.

Starved for triumph in almost every sector, India cannot let go a Sunita Williams, Kalpana Chawla and other “Indian –origin” achievers like them as citizens and achievers of their respective countries. They are neither products of the Indian system nor beneficiaries of the Indian State. We unashamedly claim them as “our own” while burying our ineptitude in catalyzing the emergence of great leaders and achievers.

Architects cannot let go their fixation with making each building to "stand out" and each building to be a landmark, at least till the next one comes along.  They cannot let go of  0.00 as their datum level. If quality of our inhabited spaces have to improve, Citizens cannot not let go of the fact that poor habitats are more often the result of poor architecture, generally devoid of emotive content, without a sense of connect.

Landscape Architects cannot let go of the sad reality that they have been offering lip-service all this while about being environmental vanguards or at least being environmentally conscious. Solutions to our country’s  ecological and environmental issues that should have been a part of the profession’s roles and responsibilities have been shouldered admirably by others. Landscape architects do not figure in important programmes such as mapping urban open spaces, protecting waterbodies, urban ecology and landscape conservation. Landscape architects in India cannot let go the fact that despite the success of a few, the profession at large is increasingly seen as a redundant yet exalted profession of garden-makers and open space beauticians, where garden contractors are given preference over a landscape architect, simply because the former can deliver what he/she speaks.