Most things on the planet rile us up on a daily basis. But why do angry Indians stay calm in the face of oppression, corruption or stupidity?
Snapchat co-founders Evan Spiegel (L) and Bobby Murphy. Thousands of us uninstalled the app after Spiegel allegedly called India a poor country. Pic/AFP
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Who are the angriest people in the world?' The seemingly innocuous question was posed by an anonymous user with the handle 'HisSmileIsTooTooBig' on the social news aggregation website Reddit, a few months ago. There were a bunch of interesting replies, ranging from 'failed art school entrants' (voted the best answer for some reason) and 'gender studies majors' to 'middle-aged men stuck in traffic', 'the Taliban', 'short people' and even 'middle aged men who live through their children's sports'.
I was surprised, as I scrolled through the rest of the responses, to find absolutely no mention of my fellow Indians. I assumed it was a no-brainer, this label of being the world's angriest people, given that any foreigner on our soil or anyone tracking us on any social media platform wouldn't help but notice that most things on the planet rile us up on a regular basis. It's as if the list of things that don't piss us off is smaller and easier to deal with, when one considers just what got us hot and bothered over the past couple of weeks alone.
There was that little matter about the CEO of Snapchat allegedly calling us a poor country, for instance. Thousands of us uninstalled the app in protest. Thousands uninstalled the wrong app too, because anger prevents a large number of us from paying attention to detail. None of the thousands expressed anger about the fact that successive governments have failed to bridge that increasingly large gap between rich or poor, and chose to attack someone for
expressing the truth instead.
Popstar Katy Perry angered a bunch of us by posting a photograph of Goddess Kali on her Instagram page, with the caption 'Current Mood.' She meant well, of course, and has often spoken of her interest and respect for Indian culture, but that didn't prevent a few from frothing at the mouth and demanding that she remove the picture.
What made this anger amusing was the fairly obvious fact that few of the ones abusing her had a viable excuse for why she couldn't post the picture. Some of the trolls abusing her didn't know who she was either, but thought it made sense to attack her simply because she wasn't Indian. The image in question wasn't abusive, doctored or demeaning in any way, but it's hard to have a logical discussion with people who learn more from WhatsApp than they do from educational institutes.
It's easy to dismiss these vitriolic attacks as exceptions to the norm, or ignore them by mentioning how, for every one person ranting online, there are thousands of Indians without access to a smartphone or television set. That's beside the point though. It's fairly obvious to anyone looking at us from the outside that we are fast becoming a thin-skinned nation and contrary to what a number of people on Facebook or Twitter may have you believe, this isn't necessarily a good thing.
Why do the angry Indians among us stay calm in the face of oppression, corruption or stupidity? Why are they never as angry about the state of our roads, the absence of public toilets, the sheer waste of taxpayer money on things that don't matter, or the incompetence of people who run for government? Why don't they attack the people who should be attacked regularly — the ones who make or enable poor decisions that affect millions of us on a daily basis?
Why don't they use their tremendous capacity for outrage in the quest of accomplishing something good for a change in this country? Why don't they question long-held beliefs that make our lives miserable simply because their parents failed to question them too? Isn't that how people evolve?
I remember going to school a few decades ago and laughing at jokes on just about every community under the sun. I remember mimicry artists on Doordarshan talking about the little things that made our religions and cultures unique, the foibles that marked us all. Nothing was sacred and, if it was, we simply didn't notice it. I find myself thinking about that time in my life often these days, whenever a stand-up comic is threatened for cracking a joke, or an actor is asked to leave the country for simply posing a question.
The saddest thing about life in India in 2017 is how it's safe to say that our ability to laugh at ourselves has been lost. Which is probably why it's only the rest of the world now laughing at us.
When he isn't ranting about all things Mumbai, Lindsay Pereira can be almost sweet. He tweets @lindsaypereira
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