Brit Writers Blog - Why I hate my country by Khushboo Choudhry

Going by the title of this post, you may tend to think I’m not patriotic or not eligible to stay in my country. I’m an Indian girl, I have stayed in India my whole life. There are a million reasons why I love my country but there are a billion reasons why I hate it. If I could change even one of those hateful things about India, the world would be a much better place. This country has been shattered into so many pieces, that I now believe it’s impossible to change anything but I still hold that small hope in my heart.

I start off with the people. The Indians’, men and women. There is something absolutely wrong with how we think about ourselves. We think we are the greatest boon that the earth has been blessed with. It could be a curse. The land is filthy, the water polluted, people have to run around for water. Some places get running water for just an hour in the whole day. There are fights over water, over buckets and god forbid, if you’re late to get that one hour of water, you have to live without it for the whole day.

The political system in the country is the worst kind you would ever see. Everyone thinks he/she is a politician even when they just rule over a block. We have uncrowned and dethroned kings and queens, in their own rights. During elections, there are riots and the minions of these politicians manage to bribe the general public to vote for their parties. This is how we are a democracy. You cannot even call us a democracy because it’s just a plain lie. Everywhere and everyday, there are cases of corruption against these parties. The amount of black money that has gone out of the country is more than what the public has earned in 4 years. This is how we Indians call this piece of land the greatest country in the world. We abuse America saying ‘how do they call themselves the greatest country, they don’t have morals and eat beef’. We don’t have morals either, we find it okay to kill humans in the name of religion, we find it okay to kill a handicapped dog on the street citing the reason, ‘it will die anyway’, we find it okay to eat meat when our own religion forbids us to eat, and we say the Americans are stupid. If you go on the internet, type in Indian political corruption scams, you will know the extent of the situation. The amount of money that has gone out and keeps going out is unbelievable. Since the government cannot bring back all that money (they don’t have the plain guts to conduct official enquiries on government officials who fish out the money), the public has to pay it back in taxes. Some of us cannot even afford to pay taxes, but we grit our teeth and pay up. This is how we are supposed to be a superpower. We call the Chinese copycats. Even if they are, atleast they copy correctly. We are so full of ourselves, we cannot copy nicely. If there had to be a Rolex copy from China, you would never know the difference between the real watch and the fake one. If the copy was from India, it wouldn’t even look good and it would cost a 100/-, which is 1.2$. That’s all. Everyone used to say India will take over China in this global race, we’re still stuck where we started from and China is way ahead.

One of the main problems for this humongous, existential ego is our education system. First of all, we don’t encourage women to be educated in this country because it will mean they will start taking over jobs from men. There are problems between genders, between religions, everywhere is a problem. Our education system forces us to stop asking questions. This is from my own personal experience when I was thrown out of my biology class for asking questions. We are expected to sit in a room, lean back and forth, memorize everything in the books and then vomit it out. None of the schools in India is even on the top 200 list of universities. They best ones we have start off from 400. Whatever the teachers say, listen to them and never use your own creativity. It’s stifling living in this country. Parents are no better. Every parent wants their child to be a doctor or an engineer, get married and have kids. This is the ultimate dream of every parent in India. I wanted to be a writer but I never got through school because my parents said, study to be a doctor. I still refused and ended up doing the second choice I had. Now if you’re not a doctor, but you’re a scientist, the society thinks you were not good enough to be a doctor and did not get selected. Nobody stops to think, maybe he/she had some dreams. No. If you’re not what we expect you to be, you’re just not that good. Now the new trend is to do an MBA. So as soon as you graduate out of college, start preparing for your MBA. There are a million small MBA colleges like that. But what do we do? We are just the mere citizens of this country.

Coming to the gender divide here. This should have been a completely different post, but I’ll try and fit my views here. Women have absolutely no respect. We are supposed to do all the household work, while the men go drink and cheat on us, keep the man’s clothes and breakfast ready before he heads out for work, please the in-laws because you never know when they might burn you to death, give birth to boys and only boys since females have no respect anyway (there are some couples that throw their newborn girl child into trash cans because they wanted a boy). Why do you think the divorce rates are low in India? It’s because even if the woman is unhappy in her marriage, she is supposed to keep quiet and not say anything, because if the divorce happens, the society will give weird looks to the family. If a single mother decides to start dating a new man, she is thought to be an immoral person, if two people are in love, are from different communities and want to get married, the parents will just not allow it. You see, the society here is not bothered about how people are, they are bothered about the caste, religion, family heirlooms, money, the past, political influence and communities. So if none of it is what your parents wanted, forget about ever marrying the person you want. Since the girls are not expected to study, they are married off as soon as they graduate. Well, you have to show a basic qualification that the girl can read and write you know. If she wants to study anymore, it’s not allowed. As soon as she’s 20, talks of marriage start off. You have been born a girl, you have to produce children, preferably boys but if a girl is born, we can throw her out or just make her into a household mule.

This is the reason the whole male gender thinks we’re objects to be had sex with and then make us do their work. It’s called the Great Indian Male Mentality. Any man, who is Indian but has lived out of the country has a very different approach to what born-and-raised-in-India men are. Some men think that just because they have money, they can get away with anything. Rape a girl, pay some money to the cops to shut them up and go on with more rapes. There’s this famous line that these chauvinist men use when they are dealing with the incompetent police of this country, “tu jaanta nahi main kaun hu?”(you don’t know who I am?) He could be anyone, the son of a daily wage labourer, a politician. But they know how to fool the cops by making them believe they are big shots somewhere. My ex-boyfriend had the same thinking.   

The cops are no good either. The women cells in the police stations are incompetent in dealing with rape cases, so the main department has to deal with it. But what do they say? It’s a woman’s fault she got raped. It’s her fault that she wants to wear whatever she likes. These men are so horny, just don’t know how to keep it in their pants. Even a decently dressed woman, a married woman, get raped. What did they do now? It’s absolutely pathetic, the law and order situation here. Nobody gets any work done around this judicial system. If you don’t pay up, your case will remain pending in court for innumerable days. If you pay up, it will still be in the same state. Petitions for justice for high profile cases have to be filed. Those cases also take decades to reach conclusion. There is never any justice. Rape victims should also never expect any justice because you know, it’s your own damn fault you were born a woman. Scientifically speaking, the Y-chromosome is becoming smaller, it was anyway one of the smallest chromosomes. In a thousand years, there might not be any man left on this planet. So why don’t you, Indian men, start being good boys already?

I believe in a country where the citizens are given priority over anything else, where money gets used in the right way, where women can wear short skirts and heels and look beautiful to a random man, not slutty, where men know where women stand, where we get to do what we want and not get bogged down by society, where studying music is given as much importance as rocket science, where we don’t kill each other because of our different gods but listen to what each of us have to say about gods and beliefs, where being handicapped is not a sin, where being poor doesn’t mean you have to be wiped off the face of earth, where the life of a girl is as precious as that of a boy, where every difference is respected and counted as a trait, where we don’t have to worry about stepping out of our homes because we never know if we’ll see our families, where all the uncertainties of life have a certain end to them. A country where we belong, be proud of and love to be born in it. The day even a small percentage of Indians stop complaining about India, is the day I will believe that the things I voiced out may have had an effect on someone, somewhere. 

by Khushboo Choudhry

The Brit Writers Blog