Some stray thoughts on I-Day

When I was young, I would reverently watch the Independence Day parade at New Delhi every year. I thought it was blasphemous and utterly unpatriotic to avoid watching it and I got angry with anyone who dared not to. But the same display of the traditional dances, art forms, temples, tourist spots, etc. of every State, the military force, each year, bored me to tears. The unvaried patriotic and promising speeches of the Prime Ministers too did not change with years. I guess once you get into the Prime Ministerial office, you also get into the spirit and speaking mode of the office. Now, like thousands of young Indians, I too have stopped watching the parade despite my pride towards everything Indian. When our heart is not with something, our spirit too disappears with it.

While thus thinking about the Indian psyche, after many years, I remembered what Pearl S. Buck, that celebrated author who wrote Good Earth and won Nobel Prize for it, wrote on India after her visit to the country during the British rule. She very rightly summarised the Indianness when she said the worst result, perhaps, of the colonial system was to provide the subject people with an infinite excuse against work and so against helping themselves. 'You are responsible for me, you have undertaken to feed me and clothe me and govern me. If I die, it is your fault,' is the subject's attitude towards a ruler. Then, there were always the British to blame for our follies and sloth and now, we have the government, our own democratic government selected by ourselves, to do our work for us, and thus, we need just depend on government machinery for everything. After all, we selected them so that we can rest assured we need not break our back working hard to improve the society or at least our own immediate surroundings.

I have seen people who refuse to clean the area in front of their own house saying it is the work of the Corporation or Municipality. But try telling them not to park their vehicles on roads haphazardly or litter the public space, they will remind you zealously that it is a public road and it belongs to them too and they have a right to do what they want. This is just the so-called tip of the iceberg and it has penetrated deep into the 'national attitudinal psyche.'

Do we, with this kind of attitude, need absolute leaders or absolute citizens? My vote is for the latter because citizens are future leaders, not vice-versa. But then we need to be free, in mind and in heart, to be able to choose such leaders or become one ourselves. We choose carefully when choosing our leaders, we see their caste, their previous vote record, if any, how much they can spend to win an election, how much we can scrape out of it, their charm and convincing abilities. But never what they can do to help us, for free. And speaking of freedom, I cannot afford to assume we are because we are not. We are not free to choose our path in this country because all paths are decided not by our liking or interest, but by how much we can afford to spend to reach our goal. We flaunt a few success stories which cloak the countless failures.

All that is said and done, I believe in democracy, which is so much better even if it allows for moral, societal depravity and hunger and in a way increases them. I believe in it because it allows us to be free, free even to make the wrong decisions and not learn from them, free enough to be our own censure.

And coming back to the Independence Day, it is ridiculous for us to go on parading ourselves in front of the world like a peacock flaunting its feathers to attract a peahen. We are proud, I am proud that we are very near to becoming a world power in economics, intelligence and man power. But it is imperative that we work hard silently like the Japanese do and let our deeds speak for themselves instead of living in the aura of the past.