RE: Who Are We Really?
I would have guessed that becoming independent would have led them to want to reject English as a way to claim their own country back. I guess that's what they're trying to do now, instead.
This inferiority complex has transformed somewhat into an upsurge of fascist Hindutva, and an aggressive pursuit of narrow agendas playing out at top political levels. The relative statuses of Hindi/Urdu and English may be drawing closer, but the perceived divisions in the country are widening
Something that seems to be happening in a lot of countries of late :(
There are no natural lines of division across the planet which conform to any man-made sense of nationality. It can be fun to cheer a team on in a match, but the division into teams itself is as artificial and random as the lines drawn on a map to separate one set of people from another, to split people apart.
Have you read this post on countries from @mattclarke? It's very much along these lines. Most of these things are just the rules of man-made games.
Identity has always been a biggie for me - being mixed myself, I always felt and was made to feel, different. It bothered me until I let it go and realised just what a magnificent gift had been bestowed on me by having parentage as diverse as Scottish and Indian
Our instinct is to want to fit in as children and young adults. It can take a long time to realise that our difference is a new perspective and a gift. Yet, in the right environment, even as children we can grow up loving the variety around us. I sometimes wish that my grandparents had chosen to raise their children bilingual, so that my sister and I could have enjoyed the same. I'm guessing that straight after the war it mustn't have seemed like a great idea to be speaking German, though.
So much of human history we were divided up into cities, which is so much more sensible.
Cities can have their own languages, governance, cultural practices and even internal currencies (with gold and silver used for trade with other cities), there's really no need for the concept of a country, unless you want to micromanage the lives of the people on an entire continent, controlling their movements, activities, and which items they can own.
Villages, towns then cities would have been more like an expansion on the tribes, but the larger the populous, the more disconnected we become and the harder it becomes for one entity to have control without finding ways to keep eyes on everyone.
Of course, what else would the power hungry want? There is no meaning to their life without control.
Thanks for the link to @mattclarke's post - very interesting and I agree entirely :) ...... it's interesting to think just how much is the product of 'man-made' stuff. All man-made structuring, organising, writing (including religious texts, regardless of origin :) etc etc are products of thought, all divisions and groupings too. Matt's observation is astute - cities and continents, but no countries. Cities and continents retain a continuity that 'countries' do not. Pre WW1 or WW2 cities and continents no different (in location anyway :) than post, yet country lines re-drawn out of some bureaucrat's backside and onto a 'map'.
Goodness, given how some of the oldies in the UK still haven't forgiven the Germans, I don't think it would've been a good idea post WW2. Oh the insanity of it all!!
Although cities do sometimes get a name change when country boundaries change or dictators come and go.