Cry, freedom

Today is the 59th anniversary of India’s independence. All those years ago, the tryst with destiny gave us the right to be free of Britain and the Raj, but what else did it do? We bungled through our decades and now find that perhaps, just maybe, we didn’t quite get things right, not the way that we planned to, at least.

Think about our cities – we have a metropolis like Mumbai, which I call home, oozing problems from every pore. Consider our transport system, which is riddled with holes, in more ways than one. Drive in to work and you take about an hour longer than you need, because you have to navigate vast stretches of potholes that could be training ground for a Moon vehicle. Ride the commuter trains, the city’s deserved pride and joy, and you find delays, over-crowding and, recently, disastrously, a callous lack of attentiveness from the commuters that can result in tragedies like what hit our city on July 11 this year. Walk and you have to use the middle of the road, since the sidewalks are home to vagrants, shops and thriving entrepreneurship of various kinds.

Think about the truly rural regions of India, which are most of the country and its wealth. You find farmers dying from despair, killing themselves because of bad growing seasons, mounting debts and no help from the government. And that in itself if one of India’s biggest problems: the government. Spare a thought for our politicians and our political system and what comes to mind is dissension, strife, corruption and scams. While a few good men and women battle to keep things clean and transparent, the majority have a reputation that would make a Gotti blush. Whether you want a telephone connection, a ticket to Kabhi Alvida Naa Kehna or a home loan, it all gets easier if the wheels…or the palms…are greased a little.

Think about money. India is an incredibly rich country, one that has natural resources in abundance, intelligence to compete and beat the rest of the world intellectually and an endless fund of courage, determination and ambition. But where are we, in any kind of competition? The brightest brains have, for the most part, gone West, to countries like the USA and the UK, where they get the encouragement, facilities and, most of all, the money that they crave. In India, those who remain are either so wealthy that they do not know what to do with their money, or so poor that they wouldn’t know what to do with it if they had it. The rest, the teeming middle class masses, work harder as they get older, pushing themselves and their limits to get what they would consider a decent wage, a decent home, a decent life.

So that is India, as we know it. And I, for one, salute the freedom that I have because I am Indian. I can travel to almost any part of the world I choose to visit, I can live, eat, drive, work and dress the way I want, because a brave generation of people gave me that right by virtue of my nationality. And I am seen as someone from a country that is going places, problems and all, at a good clip. The rest of the world respects India. I do, too.