City youth fest seeks to foster secularism

MUMBAI: True or false?
• Before the Mughals, everyone in India was vegetarian
• Arabs are responsible for bringing spices into India.
These could have been questions figuring in any inter-college foodie quiz except that, after a while, the participants might notice a recurring theme. One that subtly pounds them on the head and makes them sit up and think about the world outside, specially on the anniversary of one of Mumbai''s most reprehensible months.
Starting this month, city colleges will participate in a unique youth festival called ''India Sabka''.The festival seeks to challenge communal stereotypes and to prompt—through a series of interestingly-conceived programmes—college students to debate and express their commitment to secularism. "The idea," says activist and filmmaker Madhusree Dutta, "is to speak the language of today''s students.
There was a time when to be secular and liberal was considered fashionable among the young. That must happen again." The challenge, says lawyer and activist Veena Gawda, was to get through to a constituency which is unabashedly more tuned in to fashion, money and anything but politics.
The organisers—including the women''s activist group Majlis and a group of young artists— have tried to work around this mind-numbing hurdle by "thinking strategically," as one activist says, "the way the Hindutva-wallahs do." Since college festivals revolve around competitions and cash prizes, ''India Sabka'' too has thought up several reality-based games.
One competition, geared towards architecture students, invites participants to look at the layout of an unnamed Jogeshwari slum which was at the centre of the 1992 riots, and has since been segregated along communal lines.
The students are given background material, like the location of the local mosque, temple, and ration shop, as well as census data to show how a mixed slum became ghettoised.
They must then come up with an interventionist design to reintegrate the slum.
So far, the response to ''India Sabka'' has been less than enthusiastic. Says Ms Datta, "To our surprise, unheard-of colleges in remote suburbs have been sending in entries, not the better-known city colleges."
But the activists are hopeful that, even if the inscrutable ''Generation X'' doesn''t express itself like the ''jholawallahs'', the sentiment is the same, typified by the response of a young freshman.When told about the event, he shrugged, " India sabka hai , man. What''s there to say? India sabka hai ."