Birds-of-Paradise¹ Mating Rituals & Chauvinistic Jingoism: The Wagha Border
While it is likely (read: definitely) overly reductive to try and encapsulate a nation’s collective unconscious in a blog post, today, I set myself the onerous task of doing just that. Thankfully, my background justifies such overly ambitious pursuits as I am technically Indian both as a dual citizen and as someone who was born in India. I say technically with good reason: the ‘Overseas Citizen of India’ (OCI) Program is nothing short of a governmental ploy to help emigrants who left India and feel bad for doing so reclaim their motherland, but it comes with almost zero (0) actual citizenship benefits. On the second count, yes, I was born in a small town in India, but my parents had already moved to the US. The only benefits of such transnational birthing were accrued by my mother²: she had plenty of family around to help navigate her pregnancy and subsequently take care of a rowdy newborn that somehow tangled himself up in his umbilical cord and had to be medically rescued.³ The sole cost of not being born in America, similar to acclaimed debate champion Ted Cruz, is that I cannot be President.⁴
After a characteristically circuitous opening (my twelve-month writing hiatus has not changed my writing tics), we now get to today’s task: assessing a nation’s collective unconscious. Carl Jung’s technical terminology is all but unnecessary, but I will misuse it nonetheless. My recent trip to my technical homeland began with a flight into Indira Gandhi National Airport in New Delhi. After a meager twenty-four (24) hours in Delhi, we returned to the airport to fly to Sri Guru Ram Das Jee Airport⁵ in Amritsar, a large city in the state of Punjab that is very close to the Pakistan border.
Much has been written about India and Pakistan’s combative tendencies and their fundamental drivers (A manifestation of religious violence? Putin-esque territorial acquisition? Good old-fashioned dominance assertion? Or perhaps just British colonialism?⁶). For the purposes of this blog, I couldn’t care less and intend to rehash precisely none of that discourse.
What I did find interesting when visiting the Wagha Border, about 20 miles East of Amritsar, was the sheer display of chauvinistic jingoism and performative nationalism.⁷ Before the ‘Changing of the Guard,’ at 5:00pm local (or 4:30pm PKT⁸), there was a literal dance party approximately 200 feet from the border gates patrolled by the Border Security Force (BSF). Not only was the dance party not discouraged or even ignored, but in fact was being choreographed by the BSF who were urging attendees to display their patriotism via jumping up and down. A not-so-state-of-the-art speaker system was blasting exclusively nationalism-centric Hindi music.⁹ Rs. 50 ($0.60) hats that looked like the Indian flag were being sold. And this was just the pre-game!
All other Changings of the Guard¹⁰ I had been to were somber and quiet affairs. This was…not that. Once the pregame concluded and the dance party-goers had found seating, the ceremony began with officers from both nations doing some sort of birds-of-paradise mating dance that inevitably ended with them flexing their biceps. Barely marching in sync, the officers would kick their legs high up in the air and then stomp down as loudly as possible. At one point, the border gates opened so that the star-crossed Lieutenant Lovebirds could get as close to one another as they performed their daily mating ritual. Even the subpar display of dancing (alt: rhythmic walking?) could not get them what they so desperately wanted: a taste of the forbidden cross-border fruit. To give credit where credit is due, they did let the four (4) women¹¹ kick off the ceremony before the men did their…thing.
Meanwhile, there was literally an appointed BSF hype man whose sole role was to elicit as much noise from the crowd as possible. Seriously — his entire job for the agonizing 45-minute procession was to get the crowd to chant louder than its Pakistani counterpart (it did).¹²
The entire ceremony left me nothing short of speechless. How could these two countries, who are sworn enemies in every way, work together to create this strange display of jingoism every day? It comes down, as it only sometimes does, to the central point of the blog post: the Indian Collective Unconscious.
Two things the reader must know.
- Keeping Up With the Joneses was practically adopted as a religion by Indians. From wedding regalia to the cost of your kid’s private tutor, from the logo on your underwear to the number of kilograms of dry fruits you can heap on others, everything is about showing off. Functionality is always a secondary consideration.
- There is effectively no concept of the Military Industrial Complex. Much like in WWII-America, the military is only a good thing that protects the nation from encroachment by enemy foreign powers (like the terrorist state of Pakistan or the land-grabbing, Communist Chinese). As such, the military can rally the domestic troops, so to speak.
With these two items in mind, it all made sense. The costs of putting on such a ceremony (actually patrolling the border, investing in infrastructure, toilets) were far outweighed by the benefits (getting the nation straight hyped about the military, signaling its dominance over its sworn Pakistani enemy, showing off its superior (louder) citizens). It was a microcosm of the USSR-US Space Race, without the positive externalities. It was the Miracle on Ice, but on Sand. It was an easy way to generate national pride, without having to do the difficult work of creating a best-in-class nation-state that organically elicits pride from its citizenry.
After spending the bulk of the article derogatorily discussing the customs of two developing nations, I urge the reader to pause and try to predict what is about to come.
But then I realized something. The weekend before I left from San Francisco was Fleet Week. God Bless America.
[1] Yes, I checked. It’s hyphenated.
[2] And thereby, by me (in utero), I suppose, which nullifies any point I was trying to make about benefits ‘only’ accruing to my birthing mother.
[3] A wholly true story.
[4] Longstanding readers will note that the author is a huge fan of Ted Cruz and is similar to the Texas Senator in one additional way: he, too, enjoys Queso
[5] I’d say it’s too long of an airport name, but then again, at least it’s not Batman Airport
[6] Long Live the Queen.
[7] Are the two phrases semantically equivalent? I refuse to remove either
[8] PKT = Pakistan Standard Time. PST was already taken (lol)
[9] Jai Ho, from the Slumdog Millionaire soundtrack, somehow made it into the playlist. I, personally, don’t think its a movie that reflects well on India, so I’m not sure whether it’s more surprising that the song made it into the movie or into the playlist.
[10] It’s hards-on, in case anyone was curious.
[11] This is the 8th wave feminism for which we have all been waiting!
[12] Chants included ‘Jai’ followed by ‘Hind’ from the crowd (literal translation: Victory to Hindustan), ‘Vande’ followed by ‘Mataram’ from the crowd (literal translation: I bow to thee, mother (India)), and ‘Bharat Mata Ki’ followed by ‘Jai’ from the crowd (literal translation (this one is easy for Hindi speakers): Victory for Mother India). Lot of matriarch content in today’s post, incidentally.
Endnote: You know, it’d be really funny if for writing this blog post I got Fatwa’d by the Indian (or worse (better?), Pakistani?) Government. That really would be funny, because I have, like, two readers, neither of whom is Narendra Modi or Imran Khan (err…Shehbaz Sharif, now).
