Having been a standing witness to the energy, spirit and enthusiasm of Prime Minister Modi’s community outreach event in Singapore, I can understand and explain what is this phenomenon around ‘Howdy Modi’.
Simply put, it is India waking up from a deep thousand year slumber, roused by yet another Narendra. While the earlier Narendra thundered in Chicago, 125 years ago, the current Narendra sets the places he visits on a thunder and lightning spree.
So, what is this ‘Howdy Modi’?
India is exuding her soft power, by releasing, on world stage, her pent up civilisational energy that has been compressed and suppressed for at least a 1000 years due to three kinds of invasions – external physical, external intellectual and later, after 1947, internal intellectual.
For far too long has India been subjected to forced supplication. For far too long has she been told that her forefathers were thieves, their scriptures were a bunch of lies and that their hegemony was worth nothing. For far too long has she been forced to believe that her children were lesser ones, her chastity was suspect and hence, her progeny was illegitimate.
Now the time has come for her and her children to rubbish the allegations and shatter the shroud of shame to proclaim her virtues and those of her children. And who better than yet another Narendra could stand up to the world to proclaim the mother’s righteousness and give her the rightful place in the comity of nations?
On every place he visits, PM Narendra Modi leaves an indelible mark of Bharat Matha and the feeling of oneness and vasuda evam kudumbakam. He writes, by his voice, in indelible letters, the eternal message of deep universal wisdom that India, the land of Bharat, stands for.
By every word he speaks, PM Modi enshrines the never-die spirit of the people of India, her traders, her academics, her hard working women, the ancient rishis and the bubbling youth who dare even the celestial bodies.
Presidential speeches, from Kennedy to Trump, have contained references to Kashmir’s problems and the need for negotiation. ( Refer Kennedy’s Inaugural speech in the UN). Now, Kashmir doesn’t figure in the problem list. Future Presidents wouldn’t talk about Kashmir like they wouldn’t talk about, say, Kerala, a state in India.
Then why do some rejoice at the paltry opposition outside the stadium? Why do some still continue to nay-say despite the spontaneous release of the long suppressed civilisational energy?
The answer is:
This big-bang release of energy is channelized by a mass leader who epitomises the very energy. Hence, forces and attitudes that have been shaped by 70+ years of entitlement driven liberalism, would find these rather out of place.
Their conditioned mind, having been continuously fed on a staple hate-oozing academic diet for the last 40 years, would view any other alternate course, that shines with progress, growth, cooperation and inclusion, as alien and hence impossible to be true. It is this mind conditioning that we should aspire to get out of and get ready to acquire an original mind that is immune to media chatter and oft-repeated cliche-driven ideologies.
And originality of mind comes by only when one sheds the cloak of arrogance acquired due to Macaulayan education of the last 100 years and begins to look inward at who one is, who his forefathers were, what were their qualities and how did they come to be.
Simply put, one needs to embark on a Bharatiya education of trying to know oneself.
Vande Mataram.
Amaruvi's Aphorisms 