Azaadi

Another independence day goes by, with speeches, parades and flag hoisting. School children blurt out patriotic songs, cars (including mine) start sporting tricolours, the new president addresses the nation, the Baba Ramdev fiasco goes on. And for the first time in my life, I get late for a flag-hoisting ceremony.

Ironically, in the 65 th year of independence, we see increased violence against North-easterners, violence in Assam and Mumbai, bomb-blasts in Pune, yet another attack on personal liberty by the West Bengal government, another car-rape in Delhi, female foeticides and an overall increase in social, political and domestic violence. Are we really free?

Kabiguru Rabindranath Tagore had the following vision for the country:

“ Where the mind is without fear and the head is held high
Where knowledge is free
Where the world has not been broken up into fragments
By narrow domestic walls
Where words come out from the depth of truth
Where tireless striving stretches its arms towards perfection
Where the clear stream of reason has not lost its way
Into the dreary desert sand of dead habit
Where the mind is led forward by thee
Into ever-widening thought and action
Into that heaven of freedom, my Father, let my country awake.”

I haven’t been much into current affairs for the past few months, but this is clearly not the way that our country is headed. Without being a perfectionist or an idealist, I think I have the right to claim that a lot more needs to be done to forge this country together as one nation, one unit.

“Punjab Sindhu Gujarat Maratha Dravida Utkala Banga” , so goes our national anthem. Kabiguru had left out the North-Easterners, not out of intention but probably out of oversight, but today they are at the receiving end of violence in India, for no fault of theirs.  I have heard North-Easterner classmates in my own school being referred to as “ Chinkis (Chinese).” Regionalism is on the rise, and regional parties are having a hay day exploiting the sentiments of the masses.

Is there a positive picture somewhere? Sure, the glass can always be seen as half- full instead of half-empty. Today, there is an increased movement across the states due to educational and job compulsions-I have myself stayed in six different states including West Bengal, managed to pick up a smattering of local dialects/ languages, albeit with the inevitable goof-ups. And today, I see a lot of people who are marrying outside their community. I have several friends, and have met / heard of people, who, coming from families that have transcended linguistic, cultural or even religious borders, are the true face of modern India. I can proudly say that my friends and acquaintances are scattered across the nation, and they represent my world. Though I am happy to be a Bengali who is very much in love with the verse of Rabindranath Tagore, and the melodious strains of Rabindrasangeet , and a Hindu who reads ( or at least tries to read)  the Gita from time to time,  this doesn’t preclude the fact that I am happy to be an Indian first. It makes me glad to see that our generation and the one younger than ours, is learning to inculcate a broad-minded outlook which can finally forge us together as a nation.

We need to take this journey further. True freedom/ azaadi begins in the mind. Let us first free our mind of prejudices- whether they are religious, linguistic or cultural. The moment we make a comparison (as someone I know did last year) that Ganesh Puja doesn’t hold a candle to Durga Puja, we have lost the game. Both are different; one may be conducted in a less grand scale than the other, but that doesn’t mean we treat the former with derision. We can learn to enjoy both. I was talking to a friend, a Sindhi, who, despite his ancestors losing their land and possessions in the Partition, described himself and his father as “super-secular.” Now, that is the spirit of independent India we must learn to inculcate, and it must reverberate across all temples, mosques, gurudwaras, churches and other places of worship.

After all, after 65 years of independence, the very least we can ask for is for us to live together as a nation and not as fragments welded together only by law and the constitution. This is the azaadi that the forebearers of India’s freedom struggle would have certainly wished for.

Vande Maataram.