I always find it slightly odd that those among us who read and write for newspapers, or for blogs, for that matter, there is such a great identity of lifestyles.

Most of us not only lead similar lives but also live in similar conditions and do similar sort of jobs. I had written some weeks ago about the diversity a hospital waiting room can present. I had found that diversity is so striking in part because of the sameness I encounter when I go to a party in Delhi or Bombay. It is not merely a question of my profession, as a semi-journalist and stage performer that I am likely to meet similar people everywhere.

But even if I go to a place where lawyers predominate or where there are lots of bankers, our interests and pastimes would not be vastly different. We would have read the same books, seen the same films, would holiday in the same places and have more or less the same aspirations.

I have wondered whether my discontent has to do with the confinements of a bourgeois life.

But I remember going to a do at Oxford, when I was studying there, when I met a couple who had spent two months traveling with a group of Naga sadhus. I would love to meet someone in a drawing room in India who had done time with an akhara of sadhus of any kind.

Or someone who, in addition to being a great fan of qawwali, had actually tried to train as a qawwal. What is it about us that prevents difference, real difference, from emerging and engaging with us on equal terms? Do we have to be a mirror image of each other in order to be like each other or to like each other?

Take Mithun Chakravarty for instance. For most of us, he would evoke a huge groan. Some might groan with pleasure and some with distaste, but Mithun’s infra dig status is a given fact from Kashmir to Kanyakumari. There might even be some amongst us who are genuinely fond of him, but decry his excesses. Ditto with Rajnikanth. And those two guys have genuine cult followings in other parts of the country.

Do people who take them seriously come from a different, non-convent school stock? Is it a given that if you go to a convent school, and when I say us I refer essentially to these types, you can never relate to a Mithun or a Rajnikanth in the same manner? I would dearly like to encounter somebody who is a genuine fan of Mithun’s or Rajnikanth’s, in the sense of having religiously watched their releases when their career was at its peak, but I nearly always draw a blank.

You might feel that liking Mithun is too much of a price to pay in order to celebrate difference, but the point I am trying to make is that as it modernises, over the last century, India is producing a breed of Indians who seem to be replicas of each other in many matters. In contemporary times, politically either they are indifferent or they belong to the left-progressive club. But as far as the details are concerned, most behave as social reactionaries, condemning politicians and upbraiding the system.

The larger point I want to make is about convent education and how important it is in producing a class, a group I should say, of Indians who have been moulded in the same clay in terms of their background, their aspiration and their ability to speak to one another across boundaries of geography, language and religion. If social secularism was based on sarv dharm sambhav fifty years ago, today it rests almost exclusively on English education.

This is not to mean that the convent-educated class is free of prejudice, but to state that it is so convinced of its lack of prejudices that its biases get naturalised into a rarefied zone of righteousness about its pivotal position. Out of the sameness of conceit emerges a sameness of being and a world view that rejects everything but itself as the rightful heir of India.

What rescues India from this sameness in a very fundamental sense is politics.

The political processes negotiate this country on a terrain where sometimes numbers do matter and more often the older ways of behaving and seeing carry greater weight than a sanitised and prosperous bourgeois speak. Politics allows for difference, for mobility and provides an open acceptance to the prejudices and iniquities that continue to dog this country at every front. Politics also allows for language, for Indian languages if you will, to make their presence felt.

There a Naga sadhu can still count for something, a good qawwal can be worth more than an evening of paid and scornful pleasure and lived experience of difference count for something.

Hain kahan tamanna ka doosra qadam ya rab
Humne dasht-e-imkaan ko ek naqshe Pa paya

Show us desire’s second step God
We found the realm of possibilities a solitary footmark

[First published in Mid-Day.]