On November 14th every year, I mourn my old friend Varsha Bhosle on her birth anniversary. This year she would have turned 69. Unfortunately she passed away in 2012, and she had ceased being her fiery public self a few years before that when she went into self-imposed exile from her column-writing.
When she and I used to write together on rediff.com we used to dream of an India that would “be somebody” (credit Marlon Brando in On the Waterfront). Today India is beginning to matter, “not in full measure” (there, obligatory nod to Nehru, because Varsha shared a birthday with him), but there are “green shoots”.
In Malayalam, we say vyazhavattom, or a revolution of Jupiter (which is twelve years), to denote a significant period of time in which epochal things may well have taken place. What has happened in the dozen years since Varsha left us? Let me take a general inventory.
Despite misgivings about the lack of movement on serious Hindu issues (such as the freeing of temples from the grip of bureaucrats and hostile politicians) it must be granted that Narendra Modi’s 10+ years have substantiated what Varsha and I honestly thought: that the only thing missing in India is leadership. (I said that in my homage to her in 2012.) Maybe, just maybe, Modi is India’s Lee Kwan Yew.
India is finally moving away from its dirigiste Nehruvian stupor, which was exacerbated, and extolled, by the Anglo-Mughalai hangers-on of Lutyens and Khan Market and JNU, and which resulted in an increasingly depressing relative decline compared to the rest of Asia and the rest of the world.
That India is beginning to matter, especially economically, and consequently in the military and diplomatic domains, should be seen as the result of bhageeratha prayatnam, especially since the Swamp in India (not the Military Industrial Complex per se but babudom) is so powerful. Not to mention the Media, and the Judiciary.
But there is so much more to be done. And Varsha would have pointed this out with her signature directness and humor: she could get away with that because she was She Who Must Be Obeyed, and imperious. She used to say things that I wouldn’t dare say: for instance, she called Antonia Maino “The Shroud of Turin”.
Varsha would have had a field day with the silly viswaguru meme, for instance. For, it is much better to learn from others, rather than have everybody mine our traditional knowledge systems and then go and patent them and sell the result back to us (eg. basmati, turmeric, yoga). India should be vishwa-vidyarthi. Learn, and, if possible, steal from everyone. (Ask China how to).
Similarly, sabka sath sabka vikas sounds like a good slogan, but let me give you Exhibit A: Lebanon. I will not elaborate, but you can go look it up for yourself.
On the other hand, as a warlike Maratha, she would have been happy to see an assertive India, one that upholds its national interests and does not bend to threats or blandishments (Exhibit B: Dalip Singh of the US trying to bully India into a sanctions regime against Russia re Ukraine).
I am not quite sure what she’d have made of the Covid fuss, but I’m pretty certain she’d have gone hammer and tongs against the imperialism of the Pfizer and Moderna vaccines, and the propagandists for the same (Exhibit C: I guess I can’t name names, but there’s a famous and prize-winning doctor who was on every TV channel at the time deriding Indian vaccines).
I write this on 18th November, another painful anniversary, that of 13 Kumaon’s last stand, and here too India has made progress, standing up to China in Galwan, going eyeball-to-eyeball on the Indo-Tibetan frontier. But India has made only very slow progress in catching up on manufacturing, and for the wrong reasons (Exhibit D: a famous Indian-American economist).
Yet, there is good news. Indians as a whole are more optimistic about their country’s future. This may be because the economic center of gravity is shifting towards us, and because it appears the Anglosphere, China, Europe, and Wokeness are all declining at the same time, and India may well benefit from being the swing state between the West and China, both hegemons.
I wonder what Varsha would have had to say about this bitter-sweet stage in India’s trajectory. Alas, I can only conjecture.
Varsha left us at a point when, as in the Malayalam saying, swaram nallappozhe pattu nirthuka, that is, as a singer you should stop singing when your voice is still good. People will ask you why you stopped singing, not why you haven’t stopped singing. She lives on in our collective memory, fierce, powerful, a compelling voice. I miss her. May she live on, forever young.
800 words, Nov 18, 2024, posted 7 Jan, 2025
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