The hand that waves the flag....

The hand that waves the flag....

Its that time of the year again….when I get numerous mails with a tricolour as the background and last line asking me to say “say I am proud to be an Indian”….and on top some “facts” about India are invariably given in bulleted points….some myths and mostly clichés and a couple of untruths….like we should be proud of being nation that has never invaded anyone (not true), of being a nuclear nation (hard to find many pluses in that), of being the only country to win freedom by non-violence (debatable) etc etc…you get my point…..when tricolour suddenly sprout up everywhere like mushrooms, in cars, on shop windows, on the TV logos and so on…..

Patriotism may be the last refuge of the scoundrel and of the weak (or not, depending on your point of view) but treating something which has been paid for in blood and untold suffering as a commodity, made into something as saleable as candy is something that is, if nothing more, tragic….

Patriotism, when drummed up by the governments for justifying atrocities or by corporates to sell a few repackaged CDs is something to be detested and fought against….and this is exactly the trap we have fallen into….both of them…..

And here patriotism needs to be understood against the independence movement….what the people fought for then was no doubt evolved from something akin to patriotism but something which was very real to them, real enough to give their flesh and blood to the cause….and perhaps the fight for independence quickly dispenses with frothy and nebulous ideas of patriotism and becomes a fight for self-respect, self-determination and right for equality….the reasons for fighting for one’s people are many and varied and need to be understood as such….

We, who are doomed to have a second-hand perception of the events, tend to simplify events and people, put whole complex movements and conflicts in a single paragraph and we do this because we are, in general, impatient to understand, impatient to simplify, impatient to put a halo over something that we feel instinctively we should feel good about……and in that effort, tend to canonize eras and people and events, classify everything as a fight between the absolutes with no grays in between and what is worse, we resist efforts to make us think otherwise…..

Come independence day, we are flooded with patriotic imagery; newspapers splashed in tri-colours, schoolchildren being taught that a few good men got us independence, a few grainy footages on TV and footages of India Gate (though forgetting to mention that those soldiers whose names are carved on the walls fought and died for the British, not for the nation’s people) and so on….every efforts is made to make us feel as free as possible to make us go to the nearby mall to celebrate our new-found freedom to shop world-class next door…..

So what do I feel we should do to escape the well-oiled machinery of the marketers? By showing more respect and thought to the people who wanted a better tomorrow and who were willing to die for the same, not by making a high pedestal which will preclude their humanness but by making an effort to understand them and why they did what they did when millions of others didn’t and oh by not reserving that respect for 15^th august only…..

Its time we ask ourselves why we our condition is so pitiable when it comes to objective historical research, why so few good books and other studies in art, cinema have been brought out which brings the men and women of that time alive for us, why the various events of that time (from all hues of political spectrum) have not been treated with more depth, why books on history taught in schools seems to have been stuck in time, why our understanding and imagery (however incomplete) come solely from the a few movies? Where, we might ask, is our Howard Zinn, to write a non-sterile/non-governmental view of history?

Is it because there will not be a market for such history? I do not subscribe to that view….people have time and again shown an interest in a more vibrant telling of history…maybe it is because its considered a risky and fragmented market or maybe if one were to allow oneself to become conspirationary, it could be because it would militate against the safe view of history that has been in vogue for so long….

The greatest tribute we can pay the women and men of that time is not by keeping them out of reach and protecting them of blemishes, but by understanding them as intimately as we can….

Emerson once said that a hero is any person, only he/she is brave for a second longer…..we can make the 15^th of august a more meaningful exercise every year if we can try and understand what made those men and women stand on for that one more second….