Tryst with Destiny

Two years back, exactly on this day, it was my tryst with destiny, the one I couldn't foresee nor the guys in the Indian Meteorological Department. Yet it came, filling the bellies of forty four rivers with an unstoppable torrent sweeping everything on its way. I wasn't ready for such a rendezvous with fate. I guess no one was, yet it came. All I could do was hold everything close to me and flee to the mountains so that it couldn't find us. Leaving everything behind to the gushing waters that had already stood an inch away from entering our home, we flew. On a tractor that could hold one, we pushed ten people and one young lady who was not ready to give up. We made it through six kilometres of waist length flood water to reach safe shores. Ever since then, my life was different.

74 years ago, a man on the cusp of a new dawn spoke to the nation of an era, where it can break all the chains of suppression and finally utter the chorus of independence. And here we are, decades ever since that glorious day, commemorating the freedom we realized.

Ever since then, this day has evoked feelings of strong patriotism and valor, sometimes so superficial that it hold any ground. Yes, it is an absolute necessity to remember the stalwarts who gave up their life so that a generation can walk freely in this land. Yet, the important question remains unaddressed, what have we made out of the independence bought with a price that's more than all our lives together? A question worth pondering about. 

For me, questions like these never mattered. Independence day was an official holiday in my long holiday at home. And then came my rendezvous exactly two years back, which pushed me down from my privileged cozy chair, something the lion share of my fellow citizens who bowed under the same flag and sang the same anthem didn't have. For a brief period of time, we were same. In calamity and loss, I could see beyond for the first time, light had finally broke through the hole.

Independence as a word and a right has evolved quite a lot over the years, what was mere freedom from colonial regime now means the opportunity to exercise the constitutional rights. And on that note, are we really independent? Does freedom knock on all the doors and embrace us equally?

"Before the birth of freedom we have endured all the pains of labor and our hearts are heavy with the memory of this sorrow. Some of those pains continue even now. Nevertheless, the past is over and it is the future that beckons to us now." 

Yes, the pains of past are over and what remains is a scar, a beautiful scar that we can point towards and teach the future generations. And yes, just like that day, the future beckons to us. While the future was all about not ease or resting but of incessant striving that we may cherish the pledges we took, to see  equality, well being and opportunity to every man and woman.

Yet in that road to the adulthood of the same freedom, are we nursing new pains, one that are self inflicted upon? In the name of communalism, narrow-mindedness, and religion, haven't we poured blood on this earth again. Haven't we bled enough for two centuries? Hasn't this soil drank enough of its sons blood?

The question is bigger than us at the moment. When the protectors of the land and the law itself turns a blind eye, we are fighting demons once we knew, now within us. It makes me wonder, the distance we walked from that day on August 15, 1947. The bridges we built, the walls we destroyed, the seeds we sow, the harvest we celebrated. From a nation on the verge of destruction, high mortality rate, poverty and hunger creeping all across, we made it thus far, much to the surprise of our colonial emperors. Thus far! Only to be a fighting within us.

A nation which boasts itself the largest democracy in the world has failed its citizens. I can't but say that the independence we once bought with blood and sweat has to be won over again. And this time not from any alien hands but from our own who has gone rogue.

There has been significant changes in the socialist and secular fabric of this country over the course of the last decade, what was once few odd corrupt minds has now pestered upon the land like gangrene. It's amazing how the people you knew succumbing to ideals of division and communalism. And it scares me thinking about the nation we are leaving for our next generation.

"And now you know what is holding him back, so that he may be revealed at the proper time.  For the secret power of lawlessness is already at work; but the one who now holds it back will continue to do so till he is taken out of the way. And then the lawless one will be revealed...."

What holds the hope of two billion people on a thin string is the Constitution of India. The only thing that sees the vast masses as one by one and address as its own. There are quiet whispers of conspiracies to take the one which holds back the lawlessness. And that would be the death of this great nation.

Yet there is hope, a foolish hope in this country, in its people that we will banish all the indifference and rise together as one. And I hope a moment comes, which comes but rarely in history, when we step out from the old to the new, when this shall end, and when the soul of a nation, long blind, finds liberation.

JAI HIND!