I know the price of freedom; it is not an extravagant claim. I did not fight the British to make India free. It had all been done four decades back by men of extraordinary fortitude who resented and fought an alien rule with their lives by the time I was born. Both my grandparents are freedom fighters and they told me that the price of freedom was your life as they gave us an old crumbling ruin with what would once have been an imposing edifice. India was free but the two centuries of plundering had left her a badly bruised and deeply scarred and burned nation. It was as though they had rescued her from a raging inferno. But unlike the famous quote on Italy that goes ‘Now that we have created Italy all we need to do is to create Italians’ Nehru did not have to create Indians. India and Indians had been there for thirty five centuries; we just had to reassert our identity. But forty years after resurrecting India, I realised the price of freedom by nearly losing it.
My India is an ever ever land. It is a palimpsest of incredible thoughts and impossible dreams of men over the centuries. It is a land of belonging than of blood. It is a wonderland where the past lives in the present. The hubristic claim of Mahabharata is befitting for my India (as Mahabharata itself means ‘Great India’) - ‘Whatever is here is nowhere else, whatever is not here is nowhere’. The best of the east and the west have gone through an active Indian mind at some time or the other. Indianness is an idea that is fully and fantastically dreamed. You cannot take anything for granted in our country. The singular thing about India as Tharoor remarked is that it can only be spoken of in the plural. Every one is a minority here; all of us have multiple identities. I am an Indian, a Malayali and a Roman Catholic at the same time, but my identities flow in one continuum well anchored in my Indianness. Despite this incredible diversity, we chose to be a democratic nation. To the west this may seem mind boggling. Here, language changes with every 400 miles of landscape. The languages of the south are Indo American in origin similar to the Australians, Sri Lankans and the ancient Mayans. The languages of the north stem from Indo Iranian roots and are similar to those in West Asia. We have 23 languages recognised in the constitution and 35 languages spoken by more than a million people besides 22000 dialects. My friend from Germany laboriously learned Hindi to come to India and to her shock found that Chennai understood as much Hindi as it understood Finnish. India was not formed based on any language; we are Indians inspite of them.
You may be amidst lush greenery in lazy backwaters or sun bathing in the golden sands under the azure sky or spluttering under heavy rains in mountains with bad roads or scorching in a hot oven depending on where you are staying in India. The topography and terrain of the sub continent is uneven and unpredictable. The geography divides India into a jumbled jigsaw of many hues. India is home to four major religions of the world and a quintessential Indian is born into a complicated web of religion, caste, sub caste, clan and sect. Two Hindu neighbours who have been in the same street for decades will turn out to be distinctly different species if categorised according to the taxonomic chart. Thus religion, place of birth, language, ethnicity, culture and cuisines are all subsets of one great identity of being an Indian, but India is more than the sum of its parts.
A country of such humungous proportions will face problems unique and unprecedented in the history of Mankind. India is also a land of inconveniences and some uneasy truths that stare at us from dark alleys. 400 million Indians go to bed hungry everyday and some less fortunate mothers have to feed mud crusts to their children crying hoarse of hunger. 42% mothers who give birth do not get medical help and nearly 45% children are malnourished. Out of 1 billion people, 7 million children go to school; only 2.84% of the Indian youth finish post graduation in India. We produce an abysmal 5600 PhDs a year. It is the very few Indians who make it amidst all adversities who bring the refreshing, galloping potential super power image of India to the world. The wealth of the four richest Indians combined will be more than what any other country can fathom. Sadly, the developing India is denied to millions. Ultimately an India denied to some of us will be an India denied to all of us. And it is in fighting these everyday battles of hunger, poverty and even hatred with my fellow Indians that I realised the price of freedom. If half of India cannot live the life of their dreams with basic human necessities, then it means we have to win a more compelling war of freedom today. The great meaningless wars that nations wage for a reason that they have long forgotten seem like an absurd farce when we see the daily battle burdening the weak shoulders of the children of lesser India. Their tears are blood of martyrdom for they are giving up their lives in their struggle for freedom in this independent India.
I have seen that India and it is unacceptable to me. Hunger is an abstract concept to a fully fed man; that is why most of us face the other way when we confront such uncomfortable truths. Communalism and the venomous hate of men based on tenuous reasons will not hold the same meaning for us as it holds for the inconsolable father who mourns the death of his only son killed in carnage. Poverty brings unimaginable humiliation that I see in the frail old woman begging at the end of the street of plush bungalows and indifferent rich people. Her moist eyes that betray a person once loved haunts me every day. I feel that I am waging a battle against different demons in my India and in my moments of frustration I feel that we are nearly losing the battle.
I am tired of looking at the far end of the charts that come out every year educating the world about socio economic indices to read my country’s name. I am exhausted at the 7 digit figure that portrays the deprived Indians in these pieces of official information. I know well that there are millions more who are invisible to the severe eyes of the economists. It is for these invisible souls and unheard voices that I hope my India will have a meaning of something real someday. Towards that dream, my Lord, let my country awake. Jai Hind!
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