Vanita Kohli-Khandekar Column: The negative Indian

Are we a negativeminded negativespirited people It is a question worth asking as the bile and venom on social media goes through the roof It is a question that arose after a fiveday work trip to Singapore It arises every time I go out of India on work mdash to Hong Kong or London the two markets that I keep tabs on In conferences or discussions in these countries there is rarely the kind of accusatory negativism that pervades all discussion in IndiaBile and venom are overflowing on social media in India Representation picThinkstockIt is second nature now for us to immediately attach motives based on religion money nationality among other things to an event or person So a gate change by Jet Airways prompted an Indian gentleman behind me to talk about how ldquoThey Jet had messed it uprdquo When I mentioned gently that gate changes are a given that they had announced it more than two hours before the flight took off and that it was on all the information screens he huffed that he hadnrsquot heard it And ldquoIt never happens in Europerdquo What does happen and which this gentleman conveniently ignored is surly behaviour in the name of service The Jet Airways staff on the way to Singapore and back was extremely patient with some difficult passengers Can you imagine passengers throwing tantrums on a European mdash or worse still American mdash airline and getting away with itThis may be a random example but it is a microcosm of the same behaviour that plagues India online in mass media and in dining room conversations Without any understanding of history economics or context we are ready to jump in with a negative perspective on everything Take for instance the terrific negativism around Pandit Jawaharlal Nehru Note I donrsquot hold a candle for any political party or person Everything he did or said is now being ridiculed questioned and trashedAs an MBA student many years ago I remember having a discussion around how his whole notion of a lsquomixed economyrsquo had pushed us into economic oblivion Now when I think of it it still looks like a bad call But this opinion is softened by some other facts Think of where he was coming from It was 1947 India had just got rid of foreign rule it was poor just getting over the violence of Partition with the threat of more looming over it And socialism as an idea was gaining currency around the world In fact till the seventies even the Americans believed that the Russians had cracked the economic code and that free markets as an idea were threatened So the mixed economy which tried to blend a bit of free markets with the Russian model seemed great for a nation struggling to get to its feetNehru Sardar Patel Babasaheb Ambedkar mdash among many others mdash had largely the best instincts for what could keep the disparate group of states that became India together They insisted on democracy a robust Constitution and all the frills that many prosperous economies still donrsquot have And democracy survived inspite of our differences as Indians mdash between north and south between various religions between castes languages It survived and became second nature to us But we forgot that it survived because leaders such as Nehru and Patel stood firm against the forces that could have destroyed the fragile democracy that India was in 1947 Now as you see nation after nation failing to deal with freedom mdash the Arab spring is a great example mdash it hits you how much we owe our founding fathersWhy was Dr Manmohan Singh a good prime minister in 20042009 and a bad one from then onwards Why was Atal Bihari Vajpayee such a fantastic statesman through one of the worst communal riots in recent times Was PV Narasimha Rao the true designer of economic liberalism in India because he stood behind his finance minister Manmohan Singh Even these questions from recent history cannot be answered completely And here we are trying to decide what Nehru or Patel should have done in a time that we cannot even begin to imagineBoth halfbaked pointless questioning of history or the ignorant glorification of it is bad Now throw in the underlying negativity technology and access What you get is thousands and thousands of illinformed historically flawed opinions mdash also referred to as social mediaThe writer is a media specialist and author Follow her on twitter at httptwittercomvanitakohlik