• Ponmala

It was Walter Mendez who coined the brilliant tagline God’s Own Country for Kerala in 1989. Kerala was then truly a heaven-on-earth for its nature’s bounty, cross-culturism, ethnic inclusiveness, decent standard of living, universal education, social equality and communal harmony. But it would be more appropriate to call it A Land of Paradoxes today. Kerala is still God’s Own Country for tourists, who are sure to enjoy its unmatchable natural beauty and hospitality, and for the migrant labourers who are honourably treated and are paid more than double the wage they would get in their home states. But its own youth prefer to escape from it in search of a God’s Own Country of their own liking and choice.

The multifaceted progress that Kerala achieved in the first fifty years of its existence makes it stand out as an object of envy among the states of the Indian Union, but it does not find a place among the ten richest states in India. Kerala has achieved hundred percent literacy, but for quality higher education its youth have to emigrate to other states and countries. It is a land of opportunities for manual workers who throng there from other states, but lack of employment opportunities is driving its youth to other countries in search of a better standard of living. Kerala’s entire landscape is strewn with opulent houses, but most of them have only senior citizens or wives and children as occupants. Keralites work in pitiable conditions in the Persian Gulf countries to build a future for their children, but a month in a year is all that they are able to spend with their families. These are but a few samples of what makes Kerala a land of paradoxes. And these paradoxes may explain why the very woven threads that created the much envied mosaic that Kerala was until recently is suddenly unravelling at a frightening speed.

Mahatma Gandhi, who had fought for the right of low-castes to worship in temples, was himself denied entry into a temple in Kerala in 1925, just because he had crossed the seas and gone to foreign lands. Swamy Vivekananda had once said about Kerala: “The poor pariah is not allowed to pass through the same street as the high-caste man, but if he changes his name to a hodge-podge English name it is all right… What inference would you draw except that these Malabaris are all lunatics, their homes are so many lunatic asylums.” Things changed for the better soon. The drive Fr Kuriakose Chavara pioneered to establish a school in every parish paved the way for children of all castes and creeds to sit together on the same bench, imperceivably imbibing a sense of social equality. Then came the fight for equality by stalwarts like Shri Narayana Guru, Ayyankali and Sahodaran Ayyappan.

But this concept of equality went terrible wrong when the communists applied a distorted and dangerous version of it to the entire fabric of Kerala’s society with an end to achieve a total revolution that would ultimately establish the dictatorship of the proletariat. As a result, children considered themselves equal to parents and resisted parental authority; students considered themselves equal to teachers and gheraoed them when disciplined, calling them names and shouting slogans like ‘we will chop off your legs and hands, and also heads if need be’; employees calculated the profit the employer would make from his business and demanded equal share or more as wages, forcing all the leading business establishments that had come up to shut down and scaring away all prospective investors; institutes of higher education turned into battle fields of political parties and dens of drug users and peddlers where murderous ragging and licentious sex was rampant – little wonder Kerala, which has long been spending a far greater share of its budget on education than any other Indian state, has hardly anything to boast of by way of a sterling contribution in the field of scientific research or academic excellence.

The only authority that commands obedience and respect are the political masters, whose patronage offers protection, career advancement and maybe a coveted government job. In this atmosphere of indiscipline and lack of respect for authority, the use of drug spread like a virus in every layer of society. Even children of age twelve and above have become addicted to it. As a result, Kerala has become the lunatic asylum that Swamy Vivekananda once thought it to be, but of a different kind. Even juveniles are committing senseless murders, students are deriving sadistic pleasure from torturing fellow students under the guise of ragging, sons are slitting the throats of mothers…

After bravely overcoming the Covid-19 pandemic and yearly occurrence of devastating floods that came in succession, Kerala is now bewilderingly staring at the drug menace, which is threatening the destruction of its very soul. As always, Kerala is rising as one to tackle it. But this is a very different kind of beast. It is a many-headed hydra that needs to be tackled on multiple fronts. Above all, Kerala’s seriously damaged soul needs to be adequately attended to if a permanent cure is to be achieved. Bring back discipline and return the love shown by elders with respect, acknowledging that they may know better.