Thoughts on “Feeling Proud”

Manu Joseph is a quirky columnist who sometimes writes different, thought provoking articles. I have written in this blog before my “love-hate” relationship with him. I like some of his columns. But when I countered him on Twitter once, he blocked me!

Anyways, I still continue to read his columns in Mint newspaper. The reason for this blog is his yesterday’s article on the recent achievement of India’s space research organisation ISRO. ISRO’s Chandrayaan-3 landed successfully on Moon and the entire nation was jubilant. People started “feeling proud”. Manu’s article correctly targets such people and such feeling: “How to survive if you don’t feel proud of our Moon feat”

This article prompted me to write this blog which I have been contemplating to write for a long long time.

For a change, I could relate with Manu’s article. I didn’t feel proud because of Chandrayaan-3. It doesn’t mean I was grudging ISRO’s achievement. Let me explain my thoughts, in general, about “feeling proud”.

Feeling proud is a very special thing, in my opinion. One should feel proud of things one achieves on his own, or contributes to, directly, to a team achievement. Anything else – one need not feel proud; there could be other feelings to describe those scenarios. For example, one may feel happy about India’s Cricket World Cup win. One may feel elated when India beats Pakistan in a cricket match. One may feel ecstatic when “Natu Natu” or A R Rahman wins the Oscars. But they cannot and should not feel “proud”. You may feel gratitude towards the Army or soldiers who make the greatest sacrifice in defending our nation. You may feel humbled by the life and career of someone like Lata Mangeshkar. You cannot feel “proud”.

The problem with “feeling proud” when you have not “earned” the achievement is that almost by default it leads to narcissism, arrogance and blind worship.

Once you feel proud, you lose the objectivity and rational thinking and start having a blind faith in the thing you feel proud of. You start defending it at any cost. You become fanatic.

During 90’s in India when I was growing up, a religious slogan became popular and paved way for toxic nationalism. It was “गर्व सें कहो हम हिंदू है”, loosely translated as “Be proud of being a Hindu”. It sounded worse when right-wing idiots poorly translated it to Marathi (my mother tongue): “गर्वाने म्हणा मी हिंदू आहे”. The problem was: “गर्व” in Hindi means “pride”, but in Marathi it means “अहंकार” or “ego / narcissism”. But nobody cared and today Marathi has deteriorated so much that nobody would even know the difference. Anyways…even for the Hindi slogan, it reeked arrogance and had an inherent attitude of confrontation.

Even as a kid I realised that the slogan was toxic. There was no pride in being born a Hindu. You may feel lucky, or blessed, but not proud. Because it’s not in our hands; it’s not by choice. Just as there is no shame in being born in some low caste or class (if you believe in such things). But when you start feeling proud, unnecessarily, of being born a Hindu, you feel compelled to defend that position. And then the downward spiral starts. You are forced to every nonsense that might be associated with being a Hindu.

Let’s take another example. I feel that we humans have innate need to be part of a group but at the same time being unique within the group. Imagine that you have developed a new language and script. You are the only person who knows it. That’s very very exclusive. But that’s hardly an achievement. Because who do you communicate with? So you need others who speak the language. So you want to be part of a group that is large enough. Now, imagine some celebrity that is Indian. Let’s say Lata Mangeshkar. As a citizen, every Indian would want to be associated with Shah Rukh. If you have two Indians who are living in the US, and if Americans are appreciating Lata Mangeshkar, both would feel “proud” that she is from their county. Both want to feel the closest connection (in this case, being Indian) to him so that they feel good; their ego is pampered. It’s another matter that both these Indians might have never met Lata, let alone have contributed to any of Lata’s achievement.

Now consider that one of those two Indians is from Mumbai and the other is from Bangalore. The Mumbai guy might feel a closer connection with Lata that they both are from the same city. This is because he wants to outdo the other guy from Bangalore so that he feels more pride in having a direct connection. If both happen to be from Mumbai and if one is a North Indian guy and the other is a local Marathi guy, the one who is Marathi would flaunt a closer connect to Lata. That way he feels an inch closer to Lata.

When you buy into this nonsense notion of feeling proud, you start worshipping 16th descendants of some great King who ruled 4 centuries ago. Not doing so is an insult to the dead King! Tell me, do we worship 16th descendant of Newton or Galileo just because that person happens to be from the same lineage of the great scientists? I know, that’s ridiculous idea. But we don’t think the same way when we think about a King or a Saint from 16th century – we tend to revere their current generations irrespective of their own values or lack of them.

The point is: once you buy into the nonsense of “feeling proud” it becomes an exercise of ego massaging and outwitting others in the game of “feeling proud”. Remember that ad of detergent: “How could her (the neighbour’s) detergent produce more white, more bright and cleaner clothes than mine?”

I hate BJP/RSS and their toxic hyper-nationalism because they have normalised the game of “feeling proud”. You’ll be labeled anti-national if you don’t join that game. You’ll be deemed unfit to live in society if you don’t show that feeling publicly and announce it to the world. It’s nauseating. And the sad part is that a large section of the society has succumbed to it – even without thinking.

Hence, anybody, like Manu Joseph, who thinks and expresses that it’s fine not to feel proud about such achievements faces a heavy backlash and trolling. Manu Joseph is being trolled badly on Twitter since his article was published yesterday.

I don’t feel proud most of the times. Mostly not about the conventional things which others feel proud of. I get other emotions to describe or react to incidents, but not a feeling of being proud. It’s a very special feeling for me and I want to use it and feel it sparingly. So far, I have felt proud only a few times. But that’s fine. I know I have or had worked hard for those things and had a legitimate claim to that feeling.

Just to sum up at what I started with, here’s a perfect example of what I mean by unearned feeling of pride 👇

P.S.: Many of my right-wing friends (actually they are not friends anymore, they are ex-friends) have difficulty understanding that I never feel proud when Indian cricket team achieves something. This blog was my attempt to explain why so.