Reviving Patriots
Imperfect and trying to belong
Today my mom was busy planting a flag in our balcony following the #HarGharTiranga as suggested under the umbrella event of Azadi Ka Amrit Mahotsav. She seemed extremely happy at the idea of a collective gesture on an important historic day. I felt indifferent about it and was wondering why.
Remember Nehru’s words? — “Our moment comes, which comes but rarely in history, when we step out from the old to the new, when an age ends and when the soul of the nation, long suppressed, finds utterance.”
What an elegantly persuading sentence and how it has moved a third world country and how many people have been freed by the inspiration of the revolutionary Indian freedom struggle! The difference however is, much like my grandmother and mother, I haven’t fostered patriotism as an expressive emotion in my life. Do I thank a generation of leaders who gave up their lives for the rights I enjoy as a free citizen today? I most certainly do! But it ends right about there, because whatever definitions and pictures I have been fed as a child about the perfect Indian, I feel I can’t possibly live up to!
Bollywood, for instance is the country’s welder of the national temperament, and it has shaped the Indian high-octane nationalism with stories of superhuman, self-assured heroes who, beat the terrorists, smash the Pakistani cricketers, leave high paying jobs in the US for their country, or are clever political kingpins who uproot social evils — none of which I can do. And the truth is I don’t even follow cricket, so I miss out on those high jolts of patriotism that bleeds blue.
My opinions aren’t limited to what I see on silverscreens though. Just recently, a friend of mine faced an issue marrying a Sindhi boy because her family said he has roots tracing back to Pakistan. Nearly every third day there’s a news article on the prevalence of Islamophobia in India. People have been openly criticised for taking to social media to address issues of pro-Hindu political agendas, comedians have been jailed for jokes they made, campus politics has been painted to display mob cultures, and little children have been taught history that has been tailored at various important junctures. The socio-cultural dissimilarities we face in this multi-lingual country is still used as filters for something as simple as renting a house. My sister and I while flat-hunting came across ads that read ‘Only Hindus’, ‘Only Vegetarians’, ‘preferably South Indian’ etc. Cultural integration is a much bigger problem in the Indian soil than we put on paper.
The problem with history is, as years get by the gravity of the events fail to impress — like, movies about partition were simply not possible five to six decades ago when people were yet to heal from the horrors of it. But today, we can afford to have these films, empathise for a brief period about a horrific episode that split a nation by its fabric and killed a million people, and still move on with our lives as though it wasn’t much. The generation before ours, see it a lot differently. For instance, my grandmother was 6 and my grandfather was 11 when India walked into Independence. And since then, they have been around as the most eventful part of modern Indian history as I know it unfolded — alive when Mahatma Gandhi was assassinated, when the sino-indian war took place, when Indira Gandhi announced emergency, when Manmohan Singh rolled out his famous reforms of ’91 and so on. It could be this ghettoised knowledge of existing in a struggling third-world-nation that may have made them more emotional as citizens than I can ever be.
So, I don’t know what I should make out of how I love my country; I look up to the soldiers, the leaders, the heroes, the sportsmen, the idealists, the activists…I love listening to the national anthem being played in the open, or on TV screens during an olympics ceremony. Lata Mangeshkar’s ‘Aye mere watan ke logo’ most certainly moves me! Yet I’m not sure that’s it. I want to learn to belong as me in everything that makes us different yet one…I wonder if it’s possible to love my country on my own terms, until someone else teaches me how to do it more gloriously!
