India has poverty, hunger, corruption, bad taste in music, movies, books (subject to what view you prescribe, this is true of every country!). We watch pathetic Bollywood movies where there are 5 songs declaring love, cheesy dialogs, mindless comedy, senseless fights and no story. We enjoy them! We listen to songs like "Munni Badnaam Huyi" or "Dekha jo tujhe yaar, dil mein baji guitar!", we distort our culture and heritage by copying the west (this i hate, but that's India), we sketch and declare love on the walls of heritage monuments. We wear tacky clothes, like tacky things, go crazy romantic. We have a hundred thousand problems. We are conservative yet liberal at times failing to be just to either. We try being people we are not. We Indians are stupid. We waste time on cricket matches, we prefer beauty over brains. We have no sense of time or proportion, we have no proper healthcare or sanitation, we are poor, we fight over issues so bad that we scare away MNCs from our cities, we get communal, we fight and tease each other about their state, we take false pride in belonging to communities that are said to have progressed a lot. We have cheap booze, we buy branded clothes from the export supply roadside shop. We live on panipuri and chat. We drive rash while listening to pretentious hard rock music, having very much Indian ethos that we feel ashamed to acclaim. We allow movies like Slumdog Millionaire to be shot in the country and we run after the Oscar only because the West approves of it. We realize the talent in Amartya Sen or Satyajit Ray or even Tagore only after they've be applauded by the world. We Indians are really stupid.
But there's passion in our stupidity, there's intellect coexisting with everything tacky. We, inspite of being "underdeveloped" are liberal enough to let the West mock us while we laugh at them. In spite of being stuck with a population problem, we are the fastest growing economy. We have our music, our dance, our paintings- and not one, high quality and more than 20 schools in each. We have lingual and cultural variety. We have 28 countries in one and yet we are one. All the stupidity makes sense because at heart we are caring, compassionate and die-hard romantic. Save a few terrorists and mafias, we basically are innocent at heart. And that is why we have been fooled time and again into being parts of various civilizations through history. And even then we haven't changed at heart, we've grown! We've taken sciences from the vedic ages, we have taken medicine from the Guptas, art from Mughals, courage from the Rajputs, spirituality from the world across. We are Indians and we are proud of it. And trust me, whatever you Westerners think, we love our country and this is the only place we ever want to be in!
