Time to reclaim India
I am sick and tired of bad news. The past few years have been a nightmare. Every morning I opened the newspapers to feel anger, despair, dread, till I stopped reading them. How much can you read about scams, murders, robberies, riots, acid attacks on women, terrorist strikes, bombings, rape and loot, honour killings? So I decided to accept every invitation to travel to break my daily news fix. I stopped watching TV news and switched over to dreadfully boring reality shows and even trashy stuff on ghouls and gossip. I tried every way to amuse myself so that I did not have to face the punishing truth about what my country is becoming. I confess there were even times when I felt reluctant to stand up for the national anthem in cinema halls. If you are not exactly feeling proud of your country, why on earth must you play out a sham?
There’s something seriously wrong with such an order itself. You cannot impose patriotism on people. It must come from within. There was a time when our hearts swelled with pride every time we saw the tricolour wave or heard the national anthem play. That pride has gone out of our lives today. What remains is but a gaping void and a shining rage. We are angry with everything around us. But, above all, we are angry with ourselves. How could we have allowed the rot to set in so deep? Why were we blind for so long? Why did we not protest before protest itself became an ineffective tool?
Yes, something has gone wrong with India and the rot begins with you and me.
If we are to fight the rot, we must stand up, each one of us, and try to reclaim our India. We must reclaim our India from the politicians. We must reclaim our India from those businessmen who have brought it shame and disrepute. And yes, we must also reclaim our India from the media. We must reclaim it from the prophets of doom who constantly declaim that our dreams are dead. We must rediscover hope. We must find our dreams again. We must look in every nook and cranny where beauty, talent, faith and hope lie. We must reclaim our imagination. We must challenge ourselves to rise above the faithlessness around us and seek that courage which we have ignored while drooling over instant success.
Life is not Maggie noodles. There are no quick fixes to the problems around us. But there are ways to rise above them and, hopefully, beat them. Those ways do not lie in blind outrage. They lie in our capacity to rise above our disappointments, our rage and seek real solutions. How do we do it? It’s easy. The first step is: Do not keep quiet. Do not tolerate injustice. Do not look away when you see people doing wrong. Seek the courage within yourself to stand up to it. That’s the first step towards feeling proud as an Indian. Be unafraid.
The next important step derives from this. Reclaim your freedoms. Over recent years, we have steadily lost them. To a Government trying to nervously cover its tracks after every scam. To radical fringe groups terrorising us. To crackpots and vandals. To moral brigades who want to dictate to us what we can say, read, watch, listen to, wear, eat and drink. To a political Opposition that has lost its moral compass. To pressure groups that want to keep us in the 18th century by proudly endorsing caste crimes and honour killings. To a media that often loses its courage and caves in. It’s time we stood up and reclaimed our freedoms. For only a free nation is a strong one.
Remember, every time someone is arrested for a cartoon or a tweet or a Facebook post, a book or a song or a blog or a painting, every time a scene is cut out from a film because it can hurt someone’s feelings, a part of us dies. For India is the sum total of all that we believe in, however conflicting our views may be.
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