Manooski

I came across this very eloquent blog from a fellow Maharashtrian that gives vent to the travails of Maharashtrians in Mumbai. When I read these instances of Maharashtrians being put down with ethnic slurs, to being treated like a cheap criminal in your home state and city for speaking in your mother tongue, I wonder if the backlash against these wolves in sheep’s clothing for signage and communication in Marathi was not to be expected.

What started in suburban Mumbai as the roadside vegetable vendor from north India saying ‘Hamaari Bitiya Indira Gandhi’, eventually morphed in to a self-righteous demand of ‘Hindi mein bolo’. Funny how, what we believed was our national language just turned out to be ‘an official language of the central government‘ just like English. (Interestingly our textbooks in Maharashtra never bothered to clarify that, nor did they ever mention the Samyukta Maharashtra movement.) Equally interesting was the violent campaign against English medium schools in UP/Bihar during the 80’s and 90’s — apparently linguistic ‘Asmita’ is not a Maharashtrian monopoly.

But, our attempts at a more inclusive campaign of ‘Mee Mumbaikar’ only fetched us an in our face ‘Jiska number Mumbai ka, woh Mumbai ka’. So, if Raj Thackeray and his men are paying back ‘Hindi mein Bolo’ with ‘Hindi mein Ro Lo’, who is to be blamed?

The sad part is that the price of spurning the hand of friendship is being paid by soft targets and not the senile bourgeois like Bachi Karkaria, who extol the virtues of multi-generational serfs from Bihar, and who probably never travel in the BEST buses but find angels among gun-toting machos shooting at innocent passengers.