Tighten Your Seatbelts and Meet Prakash Sethi

Cuttack Sadar MLA Prakash Sethi's English speech at Baliyatra inauguration has gone Viral......the caption shrieked from the rooftop.

Baliyatras have been happening for decades, and the one of 2024 got the biggest eyeball for an interesting incident. Prakash Sethi, Cuttack Sadar MLA from the ruling party, gave a speech in English on the inauguration day. This year, ambassadors, high commissioners, and diplomats from 14 ASEAN, BIMSTEC, and Pacific countries attended the fair for the first time.

Who is Prakash Sethi?

Many not only heard his name for the first time but also heard him speak for the first time. He spoke in English for the benefit of the dignitaries who had come from the neighbouring countries. The video clip perhaps got forwarded a million times over WhatsApp.

And the story continues… another video of his interaction with the press made rounds as a follow-up to the first one.

On being confronted by the press about his speech in ‘Horrible English’; he brushed aside the allegation by saying that the speech was for the visiting dignitaries who speak and understand this type of English and this time the Odia Asmita had to be conveyed and that has been done perfectly.

Two totally different things happened in two distinctly different groups.

The ones who knew the language were shell-shocked, many cringed with disbelief and the ones who did not know the language, mostly his political constituents thought that he gave a thundering speech from an important platform.

To people like Sethi, the former group doesn’t matter as most of them don’t vote and his ultimate mission of positioning himself as an important leader before the eye of his followers was achieved. 

Charcha mein rehna hai; he has understood the ground rule to be in the news even if for the wrong reasons to stay relevant in the political space. And for that, he was prepared to take any amount of hit from the people who don’t matter. He knew what he wanted at the end and his body language exuded nonchalant confidence after achieving that. 

A few innate characteristics differentiate them from people like us.

They are the people who have nothing to lose, they are ambitious, confident, agile, and gritty and they are not ashamed of not being sophisticated. They are the Laloo Yadavs who are here to rattle the status quo. The time has come to prepare ourselves to deal with these types of public representatives in the coming years in the political arena. 

Remember the early migrants to the US? The people of that generation changed their names, religion, attire, accents, and manners to be accepted in their adoptive country. They couldn’t become one of them but made a laughingstock of themselves in the process as their poor caricatures.

The Brownsahibs and Chutney Merries of the colonial era were their predecessors.

But the IT mass migration after the 1990s changed all that. Millions migrated to the US to fill the skill void there and made that country their home. Most of them migrated not from the metros but from its hinterlands—from thousands of villages and small towns, with only four years of exposure outside those places during the engineering course at some nondescript college. 

Armed with just IT skills and the grit to strike root at any cost, their lack of Western manners or cultural expertise never came in their way of adopting the new country with its alien culture. Our people didn't change themselves to their socio-cultural standards but continued with their style as most of them lived in close communities like ghetto. The majority of their wives in the US speak English which is no different from Sethi’s but have emphatically stamped our cultural signs there. They are our cultural ambassadors who walk the streets in sarees during RathYatra and have made ghagra choli, Bhangra beats, Garba and Bollywood dance our best-exported cultural goods.

Comparing them with the earlier migrants, who were neither accepted there nor welcomed back here, these brash, uncouth guys do more to export our culture and assert our own identities in seemingly hostile foreign countries. If we see Ratha Yatra and Boita Bandana being celebrated all over the world, it is led by these gritty, unsophisticated brethren of ours. The sophisticated lot didn’t win the battle because they were too worried about how they would look on horseback or if anyone would ridicule them for what they were.

We must take note of this fact.

Let us not forget how the monopolization of the political space by one party, which was led by a few people for close to a quarter century, did not give any leader the space to hone their skills and grow. The systematic destruction of college-level politics, which is known as the nursery of future leaders, emasculated the state of any leader of stature for the next few decades.

We are witnessing a transition and transformation, and we must prepare ourselves to deal with these types of leaders in the coming years. We may laugh, and ridicule them in private or troll them on social media at best, but please be in the know that they are immune to your barbs and chuckles and are here to stay.