Borg and Maharashtrians

The Borg: Strength is irrelevant. Resistance is futile. We wish to improve ourselves. We will add your biological and technological distinctiveness to our own. Your culture will adapt to service ours.
-Michael Piller, "The Best of Both Worlds" Part I, episode of Star Trek: the
Next Generation (1990)

I have always been fascinated by the Borg. Though they are the enemies of starship, and of my heroes aboard the Earth spaceships, there is something about them that I find agreeable. It certainly isn't their ruthlessness. Very likely it is their will to assimilate knowledge in other species. And their mechanisms. The will to expand not just physically, but in those dimensions that
are not easily fathomable. The hive like structure was another fascinating aspect. We see it among bees and ants but not in what we term as higher beings. One possible reason is that as entities get more complex, passing on information back and forth, and sharing it with far strung quarters becomes time and
energy consuming. So distributedness is in fact a more sustainable model. (That is what makes a "controlling" God a difficult thing to digest - but that is for another day).

Back to the Borg. I find a curious thing happening in Maharashtra. People are turning away from assimilating other cultures, alien knowledge, alien influences in the name of retaining an authenticity of their own. At least the vocal ones are. They are forgetting that nothing can be authentic. Everything
is ephemeral and hence borrowed. You just have to dig deeper to realize that.

The backers of Marathi often forget that English rules mainly because it assimilated influences from other languages more easily (besides the fact that English speakers boldly went forth rather than drawing artificial boundaries around themselves). A language is only as flowery or terse as your understanding of it. To two lovers a wink on an eye means the universe. It doesn't even need words.

The starship crew generally defeated the Borg by springing a surprise. Something that the Borg did not expect. A uniqueness of humanity that the Borg had not assimilated from anywhere else. Maharashtrians need to do exactly that if they feel their culture is being threatened. Identify what is unique about Marathi or Maharashtrians. Not just items that others have under different names or variations, but truly unique.

On a related note, the civil system needs to be strengthened to see that justice is meted to everyone alike, that there is opportunity available for the fittest and the most industrious of people. Dissolve boundaries, make the world your own. To unite, does it have to be against something or someone?

Show of strength is futile. A show of will will go farther and be more effective.