As we get ready to celebrate the anniversary of the start of the Indian freedom struggle, a battle that began 150 years ago, I start wondering how many people really understand what freedom is all about. Most think that it means the absence of chains of the limiting kind – the doors, the bars on the windows, the gates, the restrictions…but true freedom, the kind that Attenborough cried about all those years ago, is something else.
It is the air you breathe and the water you drink, the food you eat and the people you meet. It is in the life you live and the dreams you see, the bed you sleep in and the asphalt you walk on. And, most of all, it is in the face that you see looking back at you in the mirror. Because freedom is about heart, about soul, about spirit, about self. It is the story of how you believe that you can do what you want to do, be what you want to be and feel what you want to feel.
In this, there is a moral code. You cannot find true freedom by taking someone else’s. you cannot be truly free if you need to cage another soul to do it. And when you are free, you know just what it means to not be free, to be tied and tied down with more than you can break out of.
One aspect of life that keeps anyone from being truly free is love. Not the love of Harlequin romances or that word that is so casually tossed about when you talk of the ice cream that you like or the shirt you bought last week, but the love that comes from your mind, that makes you give up that much-vaunted freedom freely and happily with no regrets, ever. It allows you to be free in that you can love whoever, whatever, as much as you want to, as much as you possibly can, but it also binds you to that love in a way that you cannot be free of. It makes you feel a sense of responsibility, of gratefulness of duty, of wanting to please and never wanting to harm. It is what keeps you tied and tied down, that feeling and knowledge that makes you wonder what life was before that love happened to you.
The same loss of freedom comes from hate. You are so busy hating whoever, whatever, that you cannot set your mind free enough to see whatever else is around you, to enjoy it, to know it, to understand it, to believe it. All your energies are focussed on that hate and the object of it, so you do not have any left to find the light that is freedom. Which is perhaps why we, as Indians, will never be completely free.
Think about it.
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