Nobody watched as the children gathered and we didn't know what exactly to do with the flags except for counting them,then holding them up and waving them with a pride whose essence I am no more able to analyze exactly.( Well I guess that's a high price you pay for growing up.)
There were elders dressed up in smartly ironed kurtas,the "uncles" of the neighbourhood, who would hoist the tricolour high accompanied by inspired clapping in the local "Square". A modest shamianah of tarpaulin - everybody called it "Pandal" - used to be put up at the Square providing a nice shade over a dozen of rows of wooden,folder chairs adjacent to an elevated 'stage' made up of wooden-planks,by an enterprising uncle whom everybody called the 'decorator' (I remember the word painted in a seemingly ancient billboard above the door to his one-room office which his father used to frequent years before I was born).The "aunts", dressed up with fragrant coils of jasmine neatly tucked in their hair,wrapped in sarees immaculately worn in crispy folds and of the same colour(white with red border in the neighbourhood where I grew up)with fragrant Jasmine neatly sang 'Jana-Gana-Mana' (the inevitable first song) with a harmonium and a pair of tabla keeping the tune and the beat. There used to be little speeches interspersed with ladies singing songs,and tensed recitation of poems of an inspirational nature by the older boys and girls.
Everybody smiled on that day, including the grumpy uncle who threatened us on other days with seemingly dire consequences when the occasional,and sometimes too frequent to be occasional, cricket-ball banged against his door as we played in the pavement juxtaposed against his ground-floor flat.
I used to enjoy the merriment in the air all around to the full,consciously hoarding them up in cozy packets of silent joy tucked in a special corner of my heart(the corner has survived the onslaught of Time) which I would "use up" in calculated installments for those days of the future which were forlorn of all happiness just by the sheer depressive regularity with which everybody and everything went about as normal business -days when my mother sported a poker-face all day long after a disagreeable confrontation with a neighbour,or when my father seemed to be in a perpetual frown under the heavy weight of financially tough months. Even the grumpy uncle abused palpably harder and longer when his door was,according to him,under attack by a possible conspiracy.
But I knew that those days wouldn't last forever. There would be respite from the regularity of school which used to cast a dark,almost black shadow in my mind when I had exams,ending in a month- long holiday of lazy afternoons,accompanied by the lulling sound of incessant rain and the smell of moist earth,or a richly coloured month of festivities that saw Durga Puja being celebrated in new clothes and shoes amongst other earthly things. There would be smiles about the house too,when I would be the prince of cozy wintry nights warmed up under my quilt that just couldn't wait for the gaiety of Christmas and a new year to come and greet life.
Age saw me understand and feel the folly of the thing called politics which always brought a feeling of a low negativity,where people would swear and shout in packed buses and trams,and in the neighbourhood too. People around me,who were not in the business of formal politics,seemed to wear disturbed,angry masks, without being under any apparent compulsion - the sort of compulsion that sent my father to regular work and to vegetable & fish markets,or that drove my mother to go about her household chores with dry regularity,and engage herself in serious calculations over how much money remained for the month and how much didn't.
Age also saw me learning to feel,like and enjoy Patriotism. It came from what teachers said in the classrooms and from the stories my grand-parents(specifically my mother's mother and my father's mother) told me at bedtime and during the family afternoon siesta,when I used to come out of the confines(so they seemed, contextually)of my three-member nuclear family and go to stay with them for more than one day with my mother, and later even alone.
My paternal grand-mother had seen it all. Getting married by her mid-teens in a family which ruled over one of the biggest royal estates in undivided Bengal,she had been in the luxury that came from the vulgar richness of gold coins,money and property. And she had seen the deathly reality of a famine too, that hit parts of Bengal during WW- I I .Settling in Calcutta,she had to sustain a family under acute financial strains after the Partition of India,almost single-handedly because her husband was too worthless to earn by himself,unable to free himself from the hypocrisy of an irrelevant,meaningless feeling of aristocracy that had left him a waste of a man since his early teens,for life.
My maternal grandmother had been left with the despondency of an early widowhood that pressed upon her the sheer compulsion to raise seven children in a practical and effective way. Both my grandmothers taught me the value of modesty and the value of hardship in which one could really take pride in. They told me wondrous stories of undivided India and the valiant people who had fought for Independence.
But their present lay in a country,politically free alright but getting increasingly enchained by the shackles of corruption,poverty and the loss of self-pride by an ever-thriving politicking community who operated under the hypocrisy of meaningless tokenism and vain jingoism,and nothing more. I could feel the sadness that beseeched the two ladies when they consciously looked at their past,and then at their present. They were sad because they loved India. That made me think and discover what and how it felt to love my country,to take pride in her,and dream about good times which she and me would be happily sharing together one day.
I know that you,through your own childhood,along your own journey till now, have felt and feel the same too.
Today we see a day which sees Corruption usurping the money,India's money which would have bought food for farmers who have taken their own lives out of hunger and heartbreak. Seperatists tear India into hapless pieces so much so that we have lost the right to hoist and wave the Indian tricolour anywhere in the Indian Republic without controversy and without fear.
I'm not sure whether this sort of a write-up should be put up for public reading on a 26th. of January. Because on this day it is so necessary for all of us Indians to unite under the banner of Patriotism,to speak,write,promise,express for others to see,know,learn(& relearn) that we love our country and that we are what we are as Indians,we are proud of her,just as India is proud of her children - us,and India is a united republic.
It's unfortunate that today Patriotism has to be expressed as being a 'common banner' for us to show our belief. Yet it has to be declared expressedly, because it is a hard core reality that all sorts of "Isms" seem to be running India over - the politics in and of regionalism,communalism(even Nationalism because the possessing rights of the word have long been usurped by rotten politics to serve its own mean purpose) to ruin and viciate the wonderful feeling of Pride that this day evokes in the mind of an Indian.
Are we going the right way?And are we,in our own capacity,doing what is actually required? A false security hypnotizes us into frustrated inaction. We don't act and we don't react and we won't react unless and until the Reality of our present enters our home to affect our own families. And we pretend that IT PERHAPS won't happen. What have I done so that my daughter won't grow up,look around her and think what did her father do to stop this mess.
Nothing. And I continue to pretend that PERHAPS she won't. So far so good..
I congratulate you for and wish all of you a Happy Republic Day.
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Sent from my BlackBerry®Smartphone
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with regards from :
Dr.Anirban Chaudhuri,
Mumbai,India.
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