THE way certain sections of population in Pakistan tried to use lavish pre-wedding ceremonies of a tycoon’s son as evidence of Indian ‘prosperity’ was problematic. India is one of the hungriest countries in the world, having been ranked 111 among 125 entities in the Global Hunger Index report 2023. India is a country where activists still have to work hard to convince the government to build public toilets.

The pre-wedding show in question was clearly a facade that was designed to hide pervasive Indian misery.

The problem is that the people of the subcontinent are yet to decolonise their minds. These liberated bodies with colonised mindsets still prefer glare over grace, recklessness over sobriety, and consumption over moderation.

Those oppressors who once had colonised their lands, their bodies and their souls are now mainly down-to-earth, and consider ostentatious consumption to be a relic of the past, but the oppressed still relish in mimicking the regality of those who were once their oppressors.

In the Pedagogy of the Oppressed, Paulo Freire rightly wrote that the oppressed, instead of striving for liberation, tend to become oppressors or sub-oppressors themselves.

The bizarrely greater wealth of a handful of people, and the heart-wrenching poverty of those living in nearby neighbourhoods is substantial proof that there, indeed, is something rotten at the very core of the social system in India that increases its wealth without diminishing its misery.

Suhail Khan Mandokhel
Zhob

Published in Dawn, March 21st, 2024