Have all acute problems of India ceased to exist, that the ‘patriotic’ citizens are immersing in the luxury of going all-out to immerse in trivialities of ‘Return the Koh-i-Noor’, as if the ‘national pride’ of India and Indians hangs on it !
Firstly, this atrocious story of ‘national pride’ gets sponsored by that set of Indians who are nouveau-riche and do not have to worry about money and other perennial problems faced by the not-so-fortunate lot. Also they have nothing better to do other than visiting high-end shopping malls, multiplexes, night clubs, pubs and stadia to immerse in IPL!
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Secondly, what ‘national pride’! Millions of Indians are leading a hell-like existence plagued by rampant poverty, hunger, malnutrition, child as well as bonded labour, illiteracy, joblessness, injustice, terrorism, militancy, disease, lack of medicines and health care and what not. The menace of rape and other sexual atrocities upon vulnerable women and girls and child trafficking are also increasingly steadily. Innumerable poor Indians are either mortgaging their properties or taking loans demanding high rates of interest so as to venture to foreign lands in order to escape the wretched life back home! The plight and torture faced by the Indian domestic servants and labourers in the Gulf is beyond description. While many Indians get stranded in alien countries and rot in jails due to lack of proper papers after they had been taken for a ride by the unscrupulous agents, many of our countrymen drown in high seas while venturing to Australia on heavily crowded boats. Despite heavy bombings in Tikrit, Baghdad or Mosul during the civil war in Iraq, the Indian nurses employed in the hospitals located there just refused to return to Kerala! A war-torn nation is more preferable for such nurses than the ‘peace’ in their own backyard ie India or Kerala! Perhaps the exact state of affairs of India gets blatantly exposed through such instances! As if such Himalayan problems are not enough, India is also witnessing continuous mushrooming of fundamentalists and pseudo-nationalists who are simply tearing apart the fabric of India in the name of religion, caste, province, race, symbols like anthem and flags and rhetorical bankrupt ‘patriotic’ slogans. What ‘national pride’ do these sets of ‘nationalist’ Indians talk about!
It is a matter of immense shame and disgust, when the rhetorical exercise of bringing back the Koh-i-noor gets adopted! Would the return of the Koh-i-noor ensure food, attire, shelter, education, medicine, justice and livelihood to the billions of have-nots! Would the incoming of the diamond bring relief in the lives of innumerable child and bonded labourers and those who are toiling in slave-resembling conditions in the Middle-East, Africa and Singapore?
Had the Father of the Nation been alive today, would he have approved the ridiculous demand of returning the diamond when the overwhelming majority of the citizens are in dire straits and immersed in unfathomable miseries?
If the ‘nationalists’ and ‘patriots’ are indeed so concerned about India and desire to make it a progressive proud nation; then they should immediately stop catering to the lowest common denominator, eradicate all thoughts of Koh-i-Noor and other insignificant issues from their consciousness and instead ask the concerned authorities to devote all their energy, time and resource for the uplift of the downtrodden and eradication of all social ills so as to make the society a bit more civilized and a better place to live in.
