I woke this morning rather navigationally challenged and vaguely aware that I needed to get both feet on the ground and my head back on my neck. This darned vertigo refuses to go away for good and while my sugar levels do need checking, I cavil, since being perforated is not my favourite activity in the world. Also, the timing of undergoing a session with the local Dracula-clan is a trifle awkward – between home, work and various other mind-bogs, I never seem to eat – or not – at the right times. So driving is out of the question, while the jury is still out on the walking part.
Be that, as Nina and I love to giggle about, as it may, today (never mind that it is not the date reflected in this blog; it is August 15 in my latitude as I write this) is a big day in the Indian time line. We have a tryst with – well, not quite destiny – but the Indian flag and all that it is slated to stand for. Unfortunately, that standing is kind of obscured by all that we have come to sit down under, from corruption to child abuse, from political combobulation to a rather shaky global image if examined for more than Bollywoodian interests.
I was telling my maid this morning that as long as she lives in this country – you never know where young people travel to these days; I half expect her to wander off and become a businesswoman in the Far East or somewhere – she should firmly believe that it is the best place to be and it is the best place, stop. She giggled happily, sure that once again her rather eccentric employer was being funny. But, at a deep-down, visceral level, I firmly believe in that age old and tiredly clichéd phrase: Mera Bharat mahaan. For me, it is. If it wasn’t, I would have made more determined efforts to escape it. As far as I am concerned, I am Indian, I am proud to be Indian and I would not, even considering all that my experience and travel and education and whatever else had shown me, want to be anything else.
The problem – if you can call it that – is very simply that I believe that India is the country that can give me all that I want and has made me all that I am. Yes, I realise the problems involved, from getting a driving license to making sure that the streets are clean to knowing that hunger and illiteracy and poverty to women’s rights to everything else are issues that need to be looked at more seriously than they are at the moment. There are also the extensively discussed and never solved matters of corruption and crime and violence and justice delayed, derailed and denied. There is pollution and pelf and potholes, traffic and trickery and touts, and everything that any country would easily and happily disown. But it is all a great and glorious part of the country that I was born in, that I have lived in much of my life and that I would not exchange for any other, no matter how strong the reasons.
This is not just jingoistic fervour, you know. Many years ago, my parents and I sat down and talked about it. For us, whatever the complex motivations and machinations, India was the best place to be. The main reason for this patriotic view was the fact that an Indian passport allowed entry into most of the world that we wanted to travel to. Simple. Nothing deeply embedded in the sub (or meta) text of that one. We used that privilege wisely and well and saw much of wherever we were interested in. An Indian identity implied a hugely exciting palette of experience that crossed state lines and coexisted with colour, taste, vibrancy and vigour, in a multicultural, multi-dimensional, multi-societal blend of almost-manic sound and a fury of emotion that could signify anything you wanted it to. And when you were ready, you could crawl back into your own identity and niche and go back to being whatever you wanted to, without too much effort.
Today, in spite of everything that plagues India, that excitement and freedom still runs strong through our collective being. It does in mine, as a person with my own individual set of constraints and freedoms and as a native of this country. Which makes me what I truly am: proud to be Indian.
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