What does Freedom mean to us?

Another Independence Day, Streams of messages on Facebook and Twitter wishing each other "Happy Independence Day. Proud to be Indian". Sometimes I feel when we say "Proud to be Indian", do we want to say "Proud to be Indian despite what India is" or do we really mean "Proud to be Indian for what India is".

Would I be wrong if I say that most of us, netizens, never actually got to experience first-hand what it means not to be free. All of us have grown up in a country which is free in definition . But don't you think freedom from British is a very narrow definition of freedom. P Sainath wrote the contents of his book "Everyone loves a good drought" in the year 1992-93. That was a good 45 years after independence and if you have read the book you would realize that many people were not free even then - in all probability their conditions worsened because now they were victimized by their own (governments). In 2011, people in many parts of India are still struggling to make ends meet.

Is it enough of just feed old people or orphaned children's and visit them for a day to justify your place in society? What is our contribution to making the country a free one in the true sense. Today, my friend's maid has to buy a gas cylinder refill at Rs 600 because she does not have a proper LPG connection. That is because she does not have any documents to provide to the LPG distribution company. We buy it it at rates, subsidized for people who do not even have the documents. An irony indeed! So the country is free but a person is not free to buy a gas cylinder.

Sadly, one is reminded of this great line from Animal Farm "All animals are equal. Some are more equal than the others". In our context, "All Indians are free. Some are more free than the others." On this Independence Day, I would request all of those who read this to remember, you are only as free as the society you live in. Anything else is a bubble that is liable to burst.

Happy Independence Day!

TEDIndia 2009 Fellows announced

TED announced its list of fellows for 2009 on its website. Not all the 103 fellow are Indians (neither did I wish for anything of that sorts) but the list is refreshing. It features 103 diverse people who have been doing something really different.

The list also reiterates a simple tenet - "More often than not, it is not the lack of time or resources that prevents us from doing something, it is the lack of motivation". And that is precisely why we hear of life changing experiences which change the way we prioritize.

That is all for now, but make sure you check out the list and read up on each person on their net.

What is good for us?

Almost everyday we hear of China completing projects with the same speed at which MPs in our country rush to the well of the Parliament. Be it completing the first railway line to Tibet or building the Three Gorges Dam or something as recent as deploying an army of Janitors; In India we have examples of the jinxed Delhi-Gurgaon Expressway, the mothballed Enron project or the Iran Pakistan India pipeline.

My query is: What is lacking in our current leadership OR is it something in the Chinese leadership that has gone amiss?

PS: I am already expecting replies on the lines of - "You do not talk about the Delhi Metro Rail or the Golden Quadrilateral" or "You do not talk about summary trials and execution of offenders in China".

Proud to be an Indian ! OR Proud to be an Indian ?

A part of my group of friends is socially concious, may be hyper-concious to make up for the lack of the same in others. We talk about how people litter on the roadsides, spit and urinate with gay abandon, jump signals as if asserting a fundamental right, blah blah. These things put us off. Wait, let me talk for myself. These things put me off but are not reasons enough to lose hope or hate the people of this country.Then I read articles like "Another Bakery, Another Parzania". I wonder why do we use phrases like "Don't act like an animal" or "He is an uncivilised animal". Without generalising, I would say that even in the wild, I have not seen (as in seen on Discovery or National Geogrpahic) animals kill if they are not hungry. When hungry, animals turn animals - hunting to survive. But they do not kill to satisfy their ego or kill because the other species does not confirm to their beliefs.

Before brandishing the list of ever increasing number of billinonaires, the "overflowing" coffers, the increasing sales of luxury cars - let us spare a thought to the question if we are acting as humans at all. Unless we have redefined traits of basic "human behaviour". I can hear a few voices raising the same animal instinct propounded by Charles Darwin "Survival of the fittest" and "Doing everything to survive". Good point but I personally see it more as a red herring rather than a justifiable line of thought. My personal opinion is "Nothing in life is bigger than life itself". So no amount of reasoning can justify you taking someone's life. If you disagree, may be you could see if your reasoning is skewed to see only what you want to see or only what others want you to see. Are you at least that reasonable?

PS: The article that prompted this post is part of a new fortnightly feature on The Hindu. My suggestion, track the feature to preserve your sanity.

About the author: Harsh Mander is an ex-IAS. He resigned from the civil services protesting the 2002 Godhra riots. There are points of view which differ on the reason for his resignation and you can read about them at hvk.org. (The reason for giving this reference here is to clarify that the author was already aware of the purported "other side of Harsh Mankad" and did not write a "blind secular post". There are many more websites and interviews which talk about the good things Harsh Mankad has been doing. A simple search in Google would be all you will need).

Let us see some old Doordarshan videos to drown our guilt in the spirit of national integration.