Why Worry About an Invasion?

I consider myself to be, quite fairly, a very paranoid individual. I fear. I fear disease. I fear the state of the world: water, climate, food. I fear for the lives of young women and young girls. I fear for the state of our country. And now, to add to that fear, I fear being invaded or taken over by a China or some such nation tripping on its power.
But then, I was introduced to another concept by someone who naturally thinks differently and doesn’t even know it. And his thought process was something like this: When we do not have harmony within our own country, someone else taking over this very fragmented feeling of nationality that we, as Indians posses, might not be such a bad idea after all. Blasphemous I know, but he made sense.

He further explained to me his point because today, I can safely say that I keep my mental equilibrium going only by the intake of very limited and select information; and therefore stay away from something disturbing, which looking at the extent of my paranoia might just be everything. So not waiting a second longer to feed my ignorant soul we started off on a very brief but interesting discussion.

Let alone our limited knowledge of places like the east within our country, but there’s more: We have koorg fighting to be a separate state, Maharashtra fighting for Belgaum to be considered a part of that state, to which I quote my , by now fairly aggrieved friend saying, “It’s all in the same country, how the **** does it matter?” And I honestly couldn’t respond to that. Do we even realize what the word Nationality means? Nation? Unity? We’re at a stage in time, where we can only laugh at our “Unity in Diversity” status. We’re always a few minutes away from some sort of communal outbreak. A procession here, a dead pig there, we chase our ‘fellow countrymen’ out of our cities because they do not “belong” there, simply because they are not, and I’m not going to even try being politically correct here, “Maharashtrian”. That’s my country today. To which I quote my friend again, “it’s all in the same country, how the **** does that matter!!!” We’re ready for a few hundreds to harm each other; we’re waiting for someone else an “outsider” from within our diversity to offend us. Our Panchayat won’t hesitate for a minute before ordering the murder of a young couple because despite living in the same village, they did not economically match nor were they of the same cast; to which, the minister of that state responds something on the lines that, the Panchayat have their own way of functioning and I cannot get involved. That’s my country today. I don’t care how it was a hundred years ago, I don’t care how it is in other countries. I care about the state of my country, today.

In all this violence, hatred and bloodshed, the good of a few genuine, is tarnished. You cannot use the good, as an excuse or some sort of a balm to rub and cover up all the other nonsense that the people of this country encourage each other to partake in. If our political parties blatantly “Divide and Rule”, if we cannot stand each other because of the number of times a day we pray and how many processions we hold; If we go so far as to violently chase out our countrymen from states that claim they don’t “belong” there. Then on what basis do we demand to fight racism from the outsiders? And then what’s stopping the Chinese or someone else for that matter from taking over, maybe slowly but also, what may well be, surely?

And the answer to that sadly, is Nothing.