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Happy Republic Day, my motherland! 59th year of Hope, Independence and Equality…!
I’ve always wanted to watch the national parade but have never gotten to do so.. I just spent the day doing regular unpatriotic things.. ehh.
I want to go into politics. But how would that work? If I go to India, they’d say ‘what does she know? She grew up in America..’ and if I try here, they’d say ’she’s a foreigner, not even a citizen of this country.’ So where then? Arundhati Roy mentioned in some speech that she was speaking not as an Indian citizen but as a citizen of the world. But still, global politics seem less appealing than striving to make my country better.
I wish India the best in this new year of independence. Let us continue to move towards a new kind of freedom. Good luck, India!
Where the mind is without fear and the head 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.
-Rabindranath Tagore
I pretty much know close to nothing about cricket. I hate sports and am an extremely unathletic person. But I do know that the best of India’s patriotism shines during the cricket season. No matter how rich or how poor you are, you root for India.. It’s pretty amazing that 1.136 billion people’s happiness depends on these 16 young men… Congratulations guys.
In India right now.. and it’s burning hot. The first two days it was raining like hell and I was like please stop raining. Now, it’s sooo sunny and exceptionally hot that I’m just like ‘please rain’. It’s crazy. I’m beginning to adjust here. After all, a person needs to adapt to a place, a place won’t adapt for a person. I’ll write a detailed entry later (I’ve been keeping a journal as I promised some of you).
Today, I saw this man in front of a glittering jewelry store. The poshness of the store ended at its glass door. He was a thattan, a person who fixes gold and can make all sorts of things with it. He asked for 25 rupees from us though he fixed like 8 things. I expected him to ask for a 100. We went in the afternoon yet we were his first customers. How many more might he a get a day? One? Maybe two? For an example’s sake, let’s leave it at three. 3 times 25 is 75. 75 rupees; that’s less than $2 a day. Yet some of us complain about getting minimum wage ($6.50 an hour?).
Then there’s the guy who served us at a restaurant. It was a good place, nice food and gaudy decorations. Yet the guy who served me was my age, if not younger. I’ve friends who are waiters but they work for their pocket money, a few hours after school or perhaps to pay themselves through college. Not as a substitute for education but rather as supplements. But here… it was during the school hours, yet he wasn’t there. He wasn’t in a four-walled “safe” classroom, learning to become greater than Galileo, Franklin or Epictetus. rather he was there, a pebble among pearls; a pauper among the bourgeoisie. Marxism in the ‘God of Small Things’ makes so much sense now. What happened to the child labor laws? The ones that Surya advertised a million times on it’s evening news. What stops someone from getting a fake birth certificate? Or bribing police officers to hamper the execution of laws?
I’ve written a lot. Didn’t mean to. I was supposed to write about something else but I guess that needs to wait for later. It’s night and it’s time for me to drift into my world of dreams. So good night.
On January 26, 1950, our nation became a true republic and the Constitution of India was put into effect. Now in 2007, the world’s outlook on our country seems to be going deeper down the drain. The other day, I told my Half-German Half-Italian friend that I wanted to go back to India. In reply, she gave me a disgusted look and asked “Why? Are you crazy??” Is this what it has come to? We, as Indians, need to first believe in our own government, then foreigners will believe in it too. Instead of trying to correct other people’s opinions about us, we should correct our own opinions about India. We, both those living in the motherland and the NRIs, need to nurture the patriotic heart within us, spring It forward and let go. Maybe this year, maybe on this Republic Day, we can. We must and we will.
I came across this video recently:
This is the anthem of the India Poised movement.
Happy Republic Day!
What they said..