The freedom to be independent

(bdnews24.com, August 14, 2011)

It is the 65th year of my country’s independence on August 15, and I feel a strange sense of joy at knowing I am part of a nation that has earned its freedom. We – my grandparents’ generation actually – fought long and hard to earn that right and took huge risks, sacrificed their lives, their homes, their families to get it all. They gave it to us as a kind of birthright, something we never worked to get, something we took and still take for granted. And 64 years is a long time for anyone to learn how to be free. But what bothers me is one simple question: Have we deserved that same freedom? I wonder.

With freedom comes responsibility, maturity, ambition, ethics, honesty, reliability, accountability…so many add-ons that it gets bewildering. Freedom is not just about not needing to carry a permit to get in and out of anywhere, to be able to work and live as you may wish to or to be able to exist without persecution and prosecution for your sheer existence. It is far more than material; it has to be ethical, almost spiritual. Freedom is about giving as much as it is about taking; it speaks of a need to be a useful productive, supportive, grown-up member of a family, a community, a society, a nation.

And so I wonder, are we doing all that? Are we, in fact, capable of doing any of it? I am honestly not too sure about that one.

Consider life as it is today. We face major issues like corruption, terrorism, inefficiency, instability, poverty, backwardness and goodness knows what else, all issues that seem to have no real solution, not unless we stop, end everything and start over again. We cannot, obviously, afford to do that. We have over the past few years battled immense economic problems, recovering amazingly well from a downturn, a recession, a gradual climb back up and a volatile job market that still is not up to par in many fields.

We have battled graft in so many different forms at so many different levels, finding the corrupt in more high places than we would ever have expected, from heads of state governments and prestigious departments to chiefs of the biggest and most successful corporations. Terrorism has been less terrorising than even a year ago, but the violence has not stopped – just recently there were three bomb blasts, one rapidly following the other, in parts of Mumbai that are highly populated and thus vulnerable.

There has been environmental crisis, with oil leaking into the sea after a ship was holed and slowly sank just off the coast of my home city; another threatens even as I write this. Our roads are a mess, with the infrastructure victim to corruption and inefficiency, putting lives at risk every day in every way – people die in uncovered manholes, after skidding on badly surfaced roads, after accidents caused by potholes and rash driving. And our government…well…the less said about its functioning and organisation, the better.

So are we a bad people in a bad nation? No, not at all. We have the drive, the knowledge, the experience, the ambition and, best of all, the ability to be all that is good and positive and successful. And we are, in many pockets, in many fields, in many ways. But, as always, the bad tends to overshadow the good, working against what we actually are and highlighting what we seem to be. We are a people of God, in so many ways, a people who believe that good always triumphs. We are a people who always accept, often understand and are willing to believe, just because that is the tradition we grow up with. And we are willing to work hard, in our individual capacities, to get where we think we should be, without shortcuts, if the system permits.

Now there is the problem. Very often, the system does not permit. We get stuck in the cracks that have developed with time and negligence and, to come extent, habit. We know that, for instance, it is easy to get away with a traffic offence, especially if it is minor, like jumping light or driving without a seatbelt; all we need to do, we have seen, is pay off the cop who has stopped us and then we proceed as if nothing had happened. We know, for instance, that to get a passport, we can, if we are willing, pay a gent standing outside the passport office and thereby jump a lot of lines and shortcut a lot of procedure that would normally take longer than we like. We know, for instance, that we can get a job that we are not really best qualified for by telling the headhunters that we are related to so-and-so or you-know-who and get a salary we do not really deserve. It is all a matter of the life we know…and this, unfortunately, is it.

So whom do we blame? Ourselves or the system? Either, both, all of the above. Freedom is a flexible concept that we can easily learn to use. We should start by doing a little growing up…then we will indeed be, as they say, Indians shining!