I guess the notion of India as a single nation state seems little bit artificial to many of us. We may be an ancient civilization, but it seems we had not learned to live like one family. May be forcing Hindi on every corner of this country is not serving the country well, but it seems there is hardly any other option. May be instead of 30 states (decided on the basis of language), we should have 300 states. Then with 10 Marathi speaking states (also Tamil, Kannada or Bengali etc), regional/linguistic nationalism will be under control. We can also impose a compulsory 2 year military service for every college going (to start with) students in India. We can also start helping and respecting other languages of India Marathi,Tamil,Kannada,Oriya etc with the same spirit beside Hindi at the central level. May be we should get away with the notion of national language altogether. (We do not have a national religion, so why bother to label one regional language as a national language) Using a specific language in a political way is not doing justice to the other languages of India. May be we can also introduce the notion of a compulsory second regional Indian language to every student all over India (Hindi is also a regional language). But whatever we do, I guess all of us must agree, including Mr. Raj Thackeray that India as a civilization must survive our rebirth. After 1000 years of foreign rule, this is our golden opportunity to reach the pinnacle.
