Who are we? --Sankrant Sanu

I've just now returned from a singularly distinct and existentiality
provoking talk by Sankrant Sanu at the Seminar Hall in the institute. He
had been one of Dr Sangal, our director's, students. As a consultant and
freelance writer he has this website www.sulekha.com

It was befitting what he talked about..totally.
He began with how the West world chooses to study us Indians and dictate
terms, history, rules, vision, for us. And how carefully manipulated
their-presented facts have been as the once rulers of India to shatter
the self-esteem of the people. They, through their historians,
propagated that India, per se, didn't have any solidarity or the sense
of Indian-ness by itself and that it were the Britishers who
consolidated all the fallen pieces into one India. How more untrue could
they be when the West, England and United States included, themselves
have hardly a history to boast about. They themselves are hardly
one-and-a-half century old to boast about the solidarity of their nation.

Sanu went on to bring out the need to realize the latent talent amongst
the people and that our system, most of it a follow-up of the British
system forcefully huddled on our back, needs to improvise into a
confident and sustained self. We hardly need to blindly follow their
ideals and dismiss all our traditions as superstitious just because we
don't understand their relevance. This exactly had been deliberately
maneuvered.

The closing sentence from Lord Mccauley's proposal on their colonial
efforts revealed that the damage or loss of ownership to our traditions
and thereby the self-esteem had been clearly proposed as the necessity
to achieve what they wanted: a dominion colony. It's bewildering.