WHAT IF TUCKER CARLSON IS RIGHT

We Indians are either living in denial or just too happy to be here. The better undoubtedly is denial. Looking at our country, we at least should be on the first step to grief, with one more to go: anger. The reality, however, may be that too many Indians are happy. There is no impatience with brimming drains, poor workmanship or rampant littering.

A few days ago, Tucker Carlson, an American presenter for broadcast station Fox News, a racist usually, dealt us more home truth. After 75 years of Independence, Tucker asks, has India built anything as beautiful as the erstwhile Victoria Terminus in Bombay? The Happy Indians didn't even come to know because such news is transmitted in English. The ones in denial wrote the usual outraged rebuttal.

A familiar intuition would have struck those who heard the news as soon as it came out: you just knew Shashi Tharoor would be articulate about Empire's evils again, and so he was for about 10 minutes on prime-time NDTV. He is a surreal idea: a man whose voice is so posh most English wouldn't trust it. Tharoor now defends India's honour from colonial history ever since he won the Oxford Union debate, and some of us were very impressed. He speaks not so much for India as its wounded pride, feelings that commonly afflict the best of us, the emigrant Indians, who go abroad to places of such urban splendour they are hurt by what they are newly conscious of: that India is so crassly different, so full of misery.

Even Indians who lived all their lives in wealthy enclaves suffer when they meet the egalitarian gaze of the white man. In his eyes, you, your maid who lives in a slum, and the many Indians who defecate openly belong to the same people, separated only by a small play of chance: an idea seemingly facile but rudely true.

But this time, at least, we must curb the urge to sound smart like Shashi Tharoor.