A Morally Bankrupt Populace
“Indians are the most morally bankrupt people on earth!”, one of my friends said. Like me, he is an Indian living in the US for almost a decade. We are the quintessential sickular, libtard, pseudo-intellectual NRIs. The good for nothing kind, the ones that don’t even show up to Narindar’s (as we fondly call him) speeches when he visits US. The kind that doesn’t celebrate when another NRI becomes the CEO of a major company. You get the idea… We are the erstwhile keyboard warriors who have given up on the state of affairs of Indian politics to maintain mental sanity. Being an “upper caste-middle class-Hindu-male”, I can turn a blind eye and pretend all is fine. My friend on the other hand is a Muslim, not so easy for him to ignore what is going on.
We often get into long debates, where both parties know they actually agree but they are debating for the sake of debating. Or trying a establish a morally superior centralist approach. A sparring of intellect just to keep your instincts sharp. Our debates are of the no holds barred kind. Often the jibes and remarks are made to elicit emotion from the other person. The first one to show an emotional response of course loses the debate. So when he said, “Indians are the most morally bankrupt people on earth!”, I didn’t react. I thought this was his ploy to rattle me because he was losing the argument. We continued the debate - not sure about what, not sure where it went. This was nothing new, we always flow from one debate to another, usually with no persistence. But it was different that day. Long after I returned home, I kept repeating that comment to myself. Are we actually the most morally bankrupt people in the world?
The more I think about it, the more I feel the answer is no. But that is just because the world is full of fucked-up societies, cultures and people. We are too close to yes than one would like to be. Accepting this was really painful for me. It begs the question,
