Teaching Babyjaan nationalism

Babyjaan got her first lesson in Indian identity the day after she was born: Pride is what Indians feel when a boy is born, sorry darling, you are a girl. Ninety per cent of the 11 million children abandoned every year are girls, The Times Of India reported, in 2011, quoting a Supreme Court PIL—and my daughter became a true Indian statistic even before I held her in my arms.

Making her strong and sporty was our life’s mission and Babyjaan soon figured that her London Olympics heroes Sania, Saina, Mary, Geeta and Jwala were playing for the same side, her country, India. At 2, her nationalism was focused in that tense chant: C’mon India.

By 3 and 4, she was civic-minded.

Mama why do proud Indians (okay that’s my addition) throw so much garbage on the road? You can take charge of the clean-up when you’re older, sweetheart, I replied. She learnt to segregate dry and wet waste and discussed the Mars Orbiter Mission in school. It was also the time she found out the Prime Minister had tried to keep schools open on Christmas, one of her favourite holidays in the whole year (the others being Diwali and her birthday).

She has spent the last few years growing up in what is surely one of India’s last mixed neighbourhoods. She’s seen maghrib prayers, sat through Sunday mass with her bestie and immersed mud Ganeshas in a bucket with her grandmother chanting mangal murti morya. She’s the youngest member of a children’s choir that sings Vande Mataram and Pie Jesu with the same fervour.

She is going to be devastated when she meets ghettoized India.

At 5 she saw her first Bollywood film. And her second. She was introduced to two of the three Khans. Babyjaan loved Shah Rukh and thought Salman was silly. She can’t believe that they live in Mumbai, a stone’s throw away from each other. Next time we are there, let’s go meet Shah Rukh, she told me recently. Looks like the Khans, now all 50, are set to be part of the pop-patriotic pastiche of yet another generation of Indians.

Discuss everything in the news, her teacher always says. So Babyjaan knows about avalanches in Siachen and our army stationed at the border—though I still haven’t found the language to explain what’s going on at the Jawaharlal Nehru University (JNU) in Delhi.

At 5, Babyjaan’s generation already has a clear view of India. I can’t imagine they would take kindly to anyone telling them how to define nationalism when they are in college.

Our single-channel childhood consisted of Doordarshan and Enid Blyton, free play and Fanta. But in Babyjaan’s Bengaluru, five-year-olds spend their weekends painting 250 pillars of flyovers across the city as part of a project by The Ugly Indian, an anonymous citizens’ group that believes in action, not words. Children read picture books about skin colour (Brown Like Dosas, Samosas And Sticky Chikki) and girl wonder Malala. The first comes with a colour card that encourages you to match your special shade, from milk to mahogany. Their superheroes are female Isro scientists and street artists like Baadal Nanjundaswamy, who appears when nobody’s looking and incorporates potholes in his dramatic lifelike paintings to attract the attention of civic authorities.

Civic awareness is an important component of this generation’s idea of nationalism. The Janaagraha Centre for Citizenship and Democracy’s popular school civics programme started small more than a decade ago but is now taught to 40,000 children in 530 schools across 25 cities. This 22-period course goes beyond making children memorize the number of seats in Parliament. “We teach eighth-grade children active citizenship," says Major General K.R. Prasad, who heads the initiative. “Who is responsible for your city? From where do you get your water supply? How does waste management work?" Janaagraha is at present lobbying with government to make this course part of the curriculum.

This year a Pune student of the course designed a device that generates electricity every time a car goes over a speed-breaker. The electricity can be used to power 100 street lights.

I don’t know when politicians will realize their tired dialogues are going to sound like an alien language to the India that’s growing up at present. These aggressively disciplinarian governing strategies don’t even work with liberalization’s children.

If politicians believe that our young adults are apolitical and easily bullied, they should chat with Anshul Tewari. “We love to stereotype young people as apathetic and narcissistic," says the 25-year-old founder of crowd-sourced media website Youth Ki Awaaz. The website is read by 1.5 million people every month, mostly students and professionals in their 20s.

Tewari began Youth Ki Awaaz when he was 17 because he felt there was no space for young people to engage and share their opinions on everything from politics to family. “We all grew up in a culture of silence. Don’t speak, don’t question the norm," he says. That might explain why the youth are not as vocal, he adds. In addition to being civic-minded, India’s youth is political and engaged, Tewari believes.

The news site has taken a strong stand against the recent violence at JNU and its most popular articles at present are all about this issue. Tewari says that when they first started writing about the crisis at JNU, they were trolled vigorously for being anti-national. But as the story played out, and more and more young people began registering their disagreement with the way the students had been treated, the debate became more productive. “Over the last few days, people who agree are engaging more," he says over the phone.

If our government can’t connect with today’s youth, who still grew up in the India that hushed their voices in the name of respect and tradition, imagine how it will cope with future voters like Babyjaan, who are being brought up to believe their every opinion counts.

Priya Ramani will share what’s making her feel angsty/agreeable every fortnight. She tweets at @priyaramani and posts on Instagram as babyjaanramani.