Celebrate the Diversity

You won’t find too many women in the Northeast wearing sari. The tribal people have their own traditional dresses and they wear them. They look elegant in those dresses. Those are dresses they designed for their convenience. Those are dresses that add a unique charm to the people.

The diversity of dresses in the northeast may astound you. There are over 220 ethnic groups in that one region of India alone and an equal number of dialects. All these groups have their own dresses, cuisines, festivals, and cultures. When I started my career as a teacher in Shillong in 1986, I used to have Khasi tribal food for my lunch from a small and only restaurant near my school. It was not easy to like the bland dishes with almost no spices in them. But soon I did grow to like them so much that I thought they were better than my own traditional foods. One thing was certain anyway: they were far better than the foods I cooked myself for breakfast and dinner. My culinary skills have not improved to this day.

Later when I shifted to Delhi I fell in love with the north Indian vegetarian cuisine which my school provided me. I still consider those veg meals far more delicious and nutritious than all the stuff I get to eat in my native state of Kerala now.

I have eaten all sorts of foods: Assamese to Punjabi, Bengali to Telugu. I loved most of them. I love this diversity in my country. I love the immense diversity of food, dress, culture, language, festivals, and a whole lot of things in my country. This diversity is what really makes India a fabulous place. There may not be another country in the world with so much diversity.

Why would anyone wish to pulverize all this diversity under a nationalist juggernaut? I wonder. What a boring country would India be if everyone from Ladakh to Thanjavur spoke the same language, wore the same dress, ate the same food, celebrated the same festivals and expressed the same opinions?

The present craze in the country to homogenize everything is sheer silliness if not infantile lack of imagination. We should learn to appreciate the immense variety we have in the country. We should celebrate it. We should showcase it to the world as a rare patrimony for any country.

PS. Written for Indispire Edition 308: Variety is the spice of life. Let us celebrate India's diversity, the fascinating cultures, amazing clothes, scintillating festivals... #IndianDiversity