30 December 2013, 05:07 PM IST
Many decades ago, when India was a country with a global standing as well as was considered to be a force to reckon with in the post-Bangladesh War and post Emergency period, my ship landed up in a port city of an economically strong country. It was a country considered to be an ally of the Western world with their imposing models on democracy, equality and the rest of it, and extremely wealthy. Even the guys who swung in to regulate our movements to and from the jetty drove up in huge Cadillacs, to give just one example, and everywhere you looked there was wealth.
Large malls, bright lights, huge roads, sprawling villas, gated communities, you name it, the place looked like what Gurgaon is made to look like in the brochures. Ofcourse, when we took a closer look at the charts and asked around, we learnt that over 3/4ths of the country, going by the quaint name "the empty quarter" when it was actually about half the land-mass of this wonderful country, was still and probably still is in the boondocks. Biblical age would have been one adjective, but kind of doesn't apply there anymore, because the status of women wasn't all that bad in those days. Especially after the Red Sea nearby kind of drained itself out near the Dwar-e-Mandir allowing the forgotten tribes to cross over, and then got flooded again.
Tsunami? Well, that's what they say, now that the name has been changed to Bab-el-Manded. And oh yes, this great country was also totally dry, no booze.
But as shippies, we for sure knew that was inside the containers being offloaded was not cough syrup and agricultural machinery, just two cargo descriptions which make the world go round as any cargo handling and load planning officer will tell you. Nor, for that matter, was the loqacious Yank cargo supervisor worried about letting people know what sort of opinion he had about his host country in the manner of one who was very free as many of his countrymen are with their opinions.
"That's one banana republic out there, and what's worse, they do it unfair and bad to their own, all those guns and booze only go for the big cahunas", he said, as he tucked into the curry-rice-meat that a post-Vietnam generation of Americans associated Indian ships globally with, "glad you guys come from a really free and emerging country, where you guys stand up for your rights". Remember, that's what we were then, free and emerging, not mango people over-run by bananas. Or the big cahunas.
And in the first flush of the post-Emergency era, yes, we were standing up for our rights. Globally.
Though I don't know where and when we lost our way on that account.
Today, in the giddy delight of the AAP victory in Delhi and the larger issue of the diplomatic upper ground we appear to be scoring vis-a-vis the Americans, it is time to remind ourselves once again that we were and have every reason to be a free and emerged country.
Means what?
Means, on one side, recognise and stand for the way India appears to be standing up to the Americans on this important issue of parity in diplomatic privileges and rights.
And on the other side, recognise and stand for the way India appears to be under the new flag of the AAP, standing up to itself on the issue of parity and equity in rights and privileges for their own people.
Because, we are not a banana republic, though some days it felt as though we were heading to becoming worse than one. Now, these two relatively unrelated episodes, give some of us hope again.
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