A friend, writing a column recently, has argued that we are not so much a nation of argumentative people but a country of people who like to shout each other down. And, if we take that argument to its fullest, and throw away the national borders, we are a region where people are wont to kill other people because they are saying something that doesn't fit with their world view. This happens from Peshawar to Dhaka, from Kashmir to Kanyakumari. The word 'debate' is a foreign word, suddenly an alien concept, and it's as if we've never had the words ' tarka', 'behas' or ' charchaa' in our social-verbal genomes. We should recognize we are not 'argumentative', we are a society that tragically resembles one of those American cartoons where the larger predatory character is constantly trying to capture, hammer down and kill a smaller prey-type character, we are tragic because, unlike the animated cartoon, the larger character often manages to actually capture, hammer down or kill the victim.

In a discussion with friends the other day we mulled over the words 'tolerance' and 'intolerance' and found them both problematic. I don't want to tolerate a religion or a social or political view different from mine, nor do I want my views to be tolerated - I want my difference accepted, just as I want to try and accept views different from mine. When you say 'tolerate' there is often an unspoken 'up to a point' attached, but when you say 'accept' the time-frame tends to diminish, to go away, and this is what is required for us to move forward to a more equal and non-violent society.

This does not mean that I accept the things I find unacceptable or, indeed, intolerable. I don't find violence of any kind acceptable, and I don't want to tolerate it. Yes, if someone was to be physically violent in self-defence against physical violence, against physical attack, I could understand it, both tolerate it and accept it for that instance, but as a general principle, no matter what the religious books or philosophical tracts tell us, I don't want to be accepting of violence. I can, however, be accepting of other positions, opinions and world views differing from mine, as long as they are held by people who also accept my right to hold my own world view. You don't like homosexuals or the eating of beef - fine, don't make love to other people of the same sex and don't eat beef, don't even be friends with gay people or people who eat beef, just accept that there are people who have every right to different sexual preferences or food preferences. Accept along with this that nobody has the right to discriminate against gays or lesbians or, indeed, people who eat beef, or pork, or don't eat any animal products at all.

Difficult to understand as this may be for some people, let's add to this and say that no one should be allowed to define someone else's 'patriotism'. It is not required by law for an Indian citizen to feel the emotion of 'my country right or wrong'. Love or attachment for one's people, or the society one belongs to, may require for some the dharma of critical assessment of the State, where the person has no choice but to say the State or the government or the powers that be are wrong about this or that. This criticism, including the opinion that certain regions should be allowed to secede, or that the whole country should have a different federal structure, are part and parcel of the freedom of speech and political opinion guaranteed by the Constitution.

This freedom of thought and opinion is fundamentally different from hate speech where someone exhorts a crowd to go and attack or kill this or that group of people. Hate speech should not be tolerated, though it too often is, while dissent or a critical opinion of how the country and its laws should be is too often treated as treason or 'anti-Indian'. In this, the Left and Left liberals have often bitten their own tails and we are now paying the price; we now have to watch as the right-wingers, the hawks and the Hindutwats (not always one homogeneous clump) tramp around claiming the moral high ground about this Naxalite or that Salafi-Jihadi outrage.

I was at a literature festival party the other day when a delegate from Pakistan, a young woman, started to tell me how much she 'loved Calcutta and Mother Teresa'. I am quite partisan about Calcutta and also, from the other side about Mom T - i.e., I don't have much time for her or her so-called 'legacy'. So I started questioning this guest from Karachi about what she loved about Calcutta and why she loved the late reactionary, fascist-loving, homophobic, anti-abortionist Ms. Bojaxhiu so much. The woman from Karachi was firm in her views and the discussion got a bit heated with other people around the dining table also joining in. At some point, the perverse quasi-Bengali in me and the full Bengali in a friend got the better of us and we began to question any word of praise about Calcutta and its status as the so-called 'cultural capital of India'. Teresa? No. Satyajit Ray? Maybe, but how much do you know about him? Bengali bhadralok culture? Doesn't exist anymore. Rabindrasangeet? Super-no. Tagore himself? Okay, you can praise him, but not for the reasons you think. At some point, the woman from Karachi shouted, almost wailing, that we were 'desecrating' her 'pantheon', all her heroes, the people and culture she and her family worshipped. A small sector of my brain sent off an alarm that said one should not dismantle the illusions of one of the few people in Pakistan - a country with an unapologetic history of sneering at Bengalis to the point of rape and murder - who revered Tagore and Ray, but my own reverse-patriotism took precedence and I did not let go. However, at some point, I also found myself saying a horrendously non-PC, non-Lefty thing: I'm glad I'm an Indian living in India and not a citizen of Pakistan, Bangladesh, Nepal or Sri Lanka; I'm glad because no matter what our huge flaws we are still better off in terms of freedom of speech than all these other embattled countries. I'm glad because I can take our cultural heroes and question what I consider to be their over-sold qualities. I'm glad because this anti-hagiographism is, in part, what Tagore and Ray have themselves taught me. Try doing this in Pakistan with Iqbal or Jinnah, or in today's Bangladesh with Mujib or, indeed, Tagore. The woman from Karachi was rendered speechless at this gauche, betehzeebi, anti-host-like statement while most of the rest of the table, populated with a certain kind of Lefty-liberal Indian went "Haaawww, how can you say such a thing?"

I can say that and will again. It's not a 'patriotic' sentiment but a statement of what I consider to be a fact - despite all the attacks on and murders of minorities, Dalits, activists, intellectuals and the marginalized, our toxic miasma is a far less horrendous one than the one in neighbouring societies. And if we don't recognize that we won't recognize a way out of the collective societal mine-collapse in which we South Asians find ourselves.

A few days later, at a gig in the next literature festival, the second of three consecutive ones to adorn our otherwise barren city, I found myself again saying something odd. The panel I was moderating comprised two other Indians, two gents from the media, and two Pakistanis, two ladies, one from media and one writer. While wrapping up I suggested that each of the panellists go through the exercise of imagining a time when South Asia would be a unified zone like the European Union, perhaps with specific national identities intact but with completely open borders and free movement of people and goods. Each of the panellists pooh-poohed the idea in their own way. 'Not in our lifetimes and not in the next few generations' lifetimes' was the consensus. I'm a pretty argumentative Indian but I know when I'm shouted down, even if it's done politely and with the utmost civility. I accepted the four coalesced opinions, without agreeing with any of them. I didn't point out that when Muhammad Iqbal mooted the idea of a separate state-like thing for South Asian Muslims in 1930 he was regarded by most as being off his rocker and 17 years later his lunatic demand had turned into an actual nation. I shut up and told myself that negative ideas have quicker and larger traction than counter-intuitive positive ones, and that with this proposal I'd be in a triple minority, unaccepted and not tolerated either.