Kerala: Between nostalgia and a nightmare

By John Cheeran
Malayalis are celebrating the Golden Jubilee of Aikya Keralam today.
There are many good things that happened in the last 50 years in Kerala that makes one glad to recall and rejoice. But as always the case is, a lot more could have been achieved.
We have a great landscape but most often awful people occupy this place.
A set of people who have no time and inclination to appreciate the bounty that nature has given us. What we care for these days are empty slogans.
Fifty years down the line, compared to the vast swathes of benighted India, Kerala can stake a claim to have taken the path to progress.
But then we are busy preparing roadblocks on the super highway of globalization.
In the 21st century, we are not able to shed our pettiness in many aspects of life.
Young girls, jilted by lovers, commit suicide; students commit suicide ostensibly for not having enough money to pursue their favourite subjects and farmers come up with a cure-for-all illness by leaving us their first practical attempt at literacy -- a suicide note.
Countrymen where is our will to fight?
What purpose our literacy serves?
Free primary education and land reformation act revolutionized the Kerala countryside. Today we have an extremely rights-aware citizenry but who look forward to the state to provide them jobs and loans to be waived off.
We have become such blase spectators that we can stand and stare when a man was drowned to death in Thiruvananthapuram.
Despite the relative economic gains in this era, Kerala has been plagued by religious fundamentalism.
Muslims have stayed away from the social mainstream through their own choice. A disgraced political outfit called Muslim League, headed by a religious head, kept the faithfuls together by giving enough fuel to the majority to sharpen their knives.
History will never forgive Marxist guru E.M.S. Namboothiripad for reviving the dead horse (as described by former Prime Minister Jawahar Lal Nehru). It was EMS who forged the sinful alliance with Muslim League in their desperate attempt to stay alive in the parliamentary frolicking.
Today when you scratch the surface of terrorism in India you get the outlines of Malappuram and Kozhikode. It is hardly a secret where the fountainhead of these dirty games is.
These indeed are explosive times in God's Own Country.