Left, Right, Left, Right...

Do worry I am not askng the reader to march to the sunset, not as yet. This is a simple entry on a rather complicated observation that I made when I was a younger man in my ancestral place which, no do not stretch your imagination, is not in any remote village in Bihar but just forty six kilometres away from Kolkata connected very well for the last 50 years by suburban trains and much else.... This is not exactly my ancestral place which was in East Bengal really.... but this was the place were my grandparents and father and uncles settled when they migrated after partition....
The name of the place is not important but the background certainly is... it has historically been in the heart of the Bengal Jute belt and since the time of the British has housed a large railway workshop, both of which were the primary employers of this town... Politically, post independence with the influx of refugees and more development it has been a sort of left bastion especially, the "refugee" dominated areas... Socially very advanced like most small towns in Bengal, caste colour and creed having very little importance...at least in Public dealings...
It was in this place one fine autumn evening in a house which is connected to mine by marriage and which is the vanguard of the local left politics I saw a bizarre sight:) The feet of a visiting guru being washed by the old widow of the house... nothing unusual for a 60 year old widow, I guess.... But the next scene was even more captivating.... All the members of the family being offered the feet washed water [a few drops] as Charanamrita.... It was a disgusting sight and I left hurriedly before my turn came... and this was in 1988 and not in the age of Ram Mohun Roy!
Little did I know then that more things change more they remain the same at least in our country... This internal cotradiction between more economic and political liberalism leading to more social conservatism OR publicly professed liberalism with privately practiced obscurantism exisits comfortably side by side in the same person in our country....
I was just thinking about this waiting in the traffic in front of the Sai Mandir on Lodi Road in Delhi the other day... it's an open temple by the side of the road, where on any thursday you will see a great collection of most liberated young men and women in designer jeans, fancy cars and other behaviourial parapharnelia of liberalism jostling to get a Darshan....
You would be tempted to call them hypocrites.... but it is certainly more complicated than that.... To move forward and backward in the same stride is a job which only an Indian can accomplish....
Mera Bharat Mahan...