One wouldn’t think a pair of spectacles and a pair of sandals — the recently uncovered “Gandhi memorabilia” — could launch a thousand impassioned online debates, but then one mustn’t underestimate the free time available to Netizens. There was lots of outrage when news first came in about the long-missing items that once belonged to the Mahatma, but things got even hotter when liquor baron Vijay Mallya entered the fray and “saved” the memorabilia from foreign enslavement by successfully bidding for them at an auction. The discussions that followed have veered off in too many directions to keep track of, but here’s a selection of talking points:
— Why are Indians so careless about their heritage? Why do we keep losing valuable things and then discovering decades later that they’ve been lying in videshi museums (or in the Tower of London)?
— Getting worked up about the loss of a big shiny jewel is understandable, but how much symbolic importance should be attached to mundane things just because they have “sentimental value”? (As a commenter on Indiatimes — https://bsmedia.business-standard.comtinyurl.com/dlqgx6 — indelicately puts it, “Do we now keep Gandhi’s undergarments in museum simply because it was Gandhi’s?”)
— Does Vijay Mallya deserve the Bharat Ratna for his “heroic act of life-affirming patriotism”?
— Does Vijay Mallya deserve to be beaten over the head with a beer carton for trying to associate himself with a saint? What might Mahatma Gandhi have said to Mallya if their lives had coincided? Would the Mahatma have been provoked into briefly abandoning his policy of non-violence and smacking Mallya hard for his “corrupting and insividious [sic] culture of alcohol and sleazy debauchery with air-hostess modells [sic]”. And would Mallya have turned the other cheek, or would he have done a Munnabhai?
The incident has even given rise to flash fiction, with blogger Rama Karthikeyan (http://tinyurl.com/b22m76) putting together a story where someone comes running up to Mallya after the auction to tell him that he’d forgotten to take something that came with the auctioned items. Mallya takes a look, panics and screams “I never bid for this and I never will. What could one possibly do with this thing?” The “thing” turns out to be “The Principles of Mahatma Gandhi”, which all of India has apparently forgotten (while clinging to the man’s sandals). The Political Tricks blog (http://tinyurl.com/cwjrbd) weighs in: “We remember Gandhi only once a year, i.e. 2nd October, cleaning cobwebs on his photos, giving to his statue a good bath to clean of bird droppings.” Another blogger, Sanjukta (http://tinyurl.com/cgeuo2), does a pretend live-blog tracking the progress of the auction, though the claim that this post is “satire” is slightly off — it’s more like a straightforward exercise in preaching. (“We are all such losers,” she proclaims dramatically.)
Soon the Gandhi-critics find their voice, pointing out that India would have got its independence regardless of his contribution — Britain’s plight during the Second World War would have ensured that. To which a wag wonders if perhaps we should open a museum-cum-shrine for “Hitler memorabilia” instead.
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On Rediff (http://tinyurl.com/arwf6o), a purposeful commenter named Sheetal Kaur provides a list of other things of Indian origin that “need to be brought back (not bought back)” to the mother ship. Among them: Maharaja Ranjit Singh’s gold throne and “fighting gears”, the Riggh vedda granth [sic] from Germany, and “many more stolen by British and now on display in Victoria and Albert museum”. “How did these things even get there, I do not know,” she says. I’m tempted to point out that India has already gained a measure of revenge by appropriating a British-produced film as one of its own after it swept the Oscars.