An oddity requiring explanation!
This is a wonderfully engaging piece by a New York city lawyer who has joined the US army. As economic liberalisation has taken deeper roots in India and the western influence has become predominant in Indian society in the last decade, this would strike a chord with most readers. Especially those, who come from those sections of the society that provided a major share of officer recruits till the early 1990s.
No, at the end of the day, the issue was simply that I had joined the military. And that act was just too foreign for some in my old circles to recognize as having arisen from the normal range of motivations—chosen as one might choose to go back to school, or perform charity work, or embark on any other course that might prove rewarding. In their cosmopolitan world—my former and sometime world—wartime stints in the military just aren’t done. Not when one has other options—which everyone in that world always has.
Thus my decision demands psychological explanation. Perhaps I am in personal crisis. Perhaps I believe that Saddam Hussein knocked down the buildings that used to stand a block from my old office. Perhaps I am angry. The possibility that I am doing an ordinary thing done by many ordinary Americans at all times seems not to have occurred to them.
And so their puzzlement continues. One distressed friend, hearing of my present employment, pounds the table and unleashes obscenities. Another tells people she thinks I’ve “changed.” (My oldest friends tell me I haven’t, which is a comfort.) And another tells me that she’s happy “that you’re doing something you care about,” with the forced enthusiasm of a supportive parent. All of which I try to take with good humor. But I wonder how we came to a point at which young persons—of a class that once viewed military service as an ordinary expression of its own privileged relationship to the state—could come to see the act of entering service as an oddity requiring special explanation.
Read the complete piece here. Also check out an earlier related post on the subject – Shunning the military McJobs …how the Indian elite is not paying the burden and cost of its status.
On one hand you can join the military because it’s a good government job.
But joining it for other reasons is a big ideological statement and it’s reasonable for people to expect an explanation. A nation-state is a purely selfish entity. It’s not normal to sign up to kill and maim other humans in the service of abstract ideals like nationalism. It puts one faith to the absolute test – namely, are you willing to die for your beliefs?
Disclaimer: I didn’t read the linked article