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A time to celebrate

I was in London last week for the opening of the millennium dome.

That sounds great I know but what it actually means is that at six in the morning on the first of January, when you were waking up to a bright, crisp and shining millennium dawn in gorgeous Mumbai, I was in the thick of the midnight celebrations in a city that was cold, grey, miserably wet. A city no one in the right frame of mind would be in.

Yet I was there. So were three million visitors from all over the world (many Indians among them) who braved the inclement weather to join the celebrations. But it was not the 758 million pound dome alone that brought them there. After all, there were barely 10,000 people at the opening and less than half of them were invitees.

There were millions overflowing on the streets, crowding the banks of the Thames, filling up every pub, every restaurant, the parks, the subways, the Mall, the all-night vigils at the churches. Yet there was nothing religious about the event apart from the two minutes allotted to the Archbishop of Canterbury to say a prayer. It was one just big party where everyone was having a whale of a time. Buses and trains ran free from before midnight till daybreak just to underscore the point. While the Thames became a river of fire when Big Ben struck 12. With 39 tonnes of explosives going up in flames, it was a spectacular show. Watched by millions across the world on their TV screens. Morphing dark, wet and miserable London into this incandescent showpiece for the millennium celebrations.

That is exactly my point. Not how spectacular the millennium dome is. Not how pretty London looked that night. Not how joyous were the celebrations. But the fact that Tony Blair and his merry men could pull off an event that attracted more tourists to London on a freezing winter day than we get here in this gorgeous country in an entire year. Where there is so much to offer in terms of beauty, history, nature and celebrations.

The millennium belonged to all of us all over the world but Britain that night put up a show that made it almost look like a proprietorial event. In fact, the way they went about it you would have thought that the millennium was only coming to London. It was pure spectacle: rich, colourful, larger than life and meant not only to attract tourism in winter but also to make every Britisher feel proud of his country and its history. It was also to remind the world that Britain, small as it may be today, once ruled over half the globe.

Glitches? Of course there were glitches. More than 70 per cent of those invited did not get their tickets in time. Rows of seats remained unfilled when the show started. Only 83 out of the 150 national achievers invited actually turned up, the rest preferring to be with family and friends. Even the giant ferris wheel which was supposed to start turning at the stroke of midnight failed to budge because it could not clear all the security checks in time. Yet nothing dampened the spirit of the city. London was on a roll.

Why do we, as a nation, lack the confidence to do something on such a scale? Our winters are exquisite. There is lovely sunshine accompanying the cold. Our cities in December are certainly more attractive than fog-trapped London can ever hope to be. Yet why do we lack the will to celebrate?

Why can we never organise an event that could attract people from all over the world to come and share our joy. Can you imagine a celebration in Agra, at the Taj Mahal? Or at Fatehpur Sikri? Or in the Konarak sun temple? Or at any of those fabulous temples in the South? Can you imagine what it could do for our tourism? Even one Pushkar mela properly marketed to the world can bring amazing numbers in.

London drew 3 million tourists only for the millennium. That is more than we get in a year even though we have some of the most exotic beaches, the Himalayas, the Ganga and some of the world's greatest monuments. Encompassing cultures as disparate as Hindu, Muslim, Catholic, Jain, Sikh and Buddhist. But instead of celebrating this rich heritage and inviting the whole world to come and see what we have, we squabble over them like a bunch of demented schoolkids.

Add to that a lazy government. We were too lazy to even celebrate fifty years of our Independence. 1997 came and went almost unnoticed. As unnoticed as our ageing freedom fighters who have been forgotten by everyone and eke out their miserable lives on a pension that barely pays for their rent. Yet every millennium celebration in the world saw the Mahatma as the most powerful icon of the last century, a symbol of hope and courage in a sick world. In fact, an US judge last week handed down a landmark judgement where the leaders of a racist group tormenting blacks and Asians in New Jersey were made to watch the movie Gandhi and write an essay on what he stood for. There can be no greater tribute to modern India.

Yet we fear pageantry. We fear history. We fear celebrating anything because we fear criticism, harassment.

The Jaipur royal family which was about to celebrate its first millennium last week received an attachment notice for its city palace from the local tax authorities. The claim was for Rs 25 lakhs of unpaid taxes while the palace is worth much more than a thousand crores. The celebrations itself could have earned India a few hundred crores in tourist revenue but because of the shortsightedness of the tax officers the event died before the tourists could even hear of it.

No, it is not a question of shoring up the mystique of royalty. A free nation must learn to come to terms with its history, its past just as it must be prepared to face its future with fortitude. That is our problem. We have this huge Indian diaspora growing all over the world and yet we are constantly afraid of looking into our past; we work ourselves into a lather over what the Mughals did to our temples and the missionaries did to our tribals. Ignoring the simple fact that what we are today is a confluence of many cultures, many faiths. In learning to live with our past lies our future.

It is foolish to seek retribution today for the injustices of history. Instead, we must devise ways and means to cope with our multi-racial, multi-religious society and sidestep contentious issues like the Babri Masjid. Balasaheb Thackeray had proposed a brilliant solution: Build a memorial to Mangal Pandey on the disputed site. I would go a step further and suggest: Build any memorial to the freedom struggle and let us move on. Let us prepare for the challenges ahead instead of fretting over the past.

India in this century must emerge as a major global power. Not by testing nuclear bombs but by building a strong, just and competitive economy that can meet the world as an equal. Recent events have shown us that this is not entirely impossible. All we need is a bit of confidence in ourselves.

Pritish Nandy

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