I am not quite sure whether the sun rays touched the soil of India on the dawn of August 15th 1947 with compliments but I am sure that every face in this ancient land woke up with a smile. It was the day when India, after years of wait, was free. Nehru’s tryst with destiny speech few hours before must have brought a sense of pride, which had lost thousands of years ago when the Macedonian feet leaded by Alexander crushed the miserable Indian soil. Since then India opened its arms to embrace all the invaders most of them though inundated themselves in the land of brown people. Freedom & power brings responsibility were Nehru’s word on the eve of India’s independence. We were free, we were to be responsible. But it should be left on the time frame that has to set by the historians that how India fought its way for being free. Freedom, the word which meant the world for us, should be ace bench mark. Were we really free then? Are we really free now? If the answer to both the questions are in affirmative then what was Rabindra Nath Tagore’s heaven of freedom in which he wanted his country to awake (Where the mind is without fear, Gitanjali). I don’t consider myself in any position to contradict the Nobel-Laureate. If freedom was only meant political then it made no difference at all to any common man. They were ruled by whites & now will be ruled by browns.
India has never been a country rather it has been a school of thought, a land which witnessed standing aloof & untouched the rise & fall of human civilizations across the world. India, indeed has been a journey commencing & concluding into infinite. It has always been a perfect balance between Adiguru Shankar Acharya’s beliefs of materialistic world being illusionary & Charvak’s claim of realism lying in the outer world. It is a land where the mind of people vary so diametrically within few miles that one can get confused of his whereabouts. But these variable thoughts made the base for the narrow walls between the common man. The blessing became the curse. In remedy of it India started looking towards its past & boasted it of being a golden age. For India, there was no golden age. Nikos Kazantzakis’s Alexis Zorba took a quantum leap & became a vulnerable mixture of De Sade & Von Sacher Mascho. The religion which reached a pinnacle in this country became a perfect example of suppression of people on the name of it. The freedom itself became the bondage. This can be best put in the words of Rabindra Nath Tagore “bearing the cost of music instrument & not knowing its use is the tragedy of life’s deafness”.
Freedom in every sense means immunity from all the bondages regardless of it being political, intellectual or spiritual. C.G Jung’s remark about addiction in every kind being bad is quite true not only to a single man but also mobs, parties & nations. But the ironical part of humanity is this that we try to engulf ourselves with all such thoughts in end make us slaves. India, I find every reason, to believe became the slaves of its own in the first place. We, the people of India are still fighting on such issues that as if we living in a Paleolithic age.
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