Mera Bharat Mahan.....post Independence Day musings

As I was rummaging through an old chest of books I came across a few copies of Blackwood’s Magazine dated 1958. The write-ups were not contemporary, the style was almost archaic you would say, especially after reading Chetan Bhagat’s popular “desi” pulp  and the writers are most probably all dead and gone to the land beyond.

The journal provided short, simple and interesting articles of which one was particularly appealing. It was written by a Scotsman who had been serving in a tea garden in Assam, India. His name was Stephen Hannay.

During one of his long annual vacation, Mr. Hannay decided to visit his home in Great Britain via Moscow. In his literary piece he has written about the Muscovites of 1958 as efficient, friendly and always anxious that foreigners visiting their city should see the right things, read the right stuff and in general enjoy themselves.

What struck me, as I read on, was the patriotism that seemed to burst at the seams of every Muscovite whether a child, teenage or adult. I am not saying that it is absent among us. It is there and it surges forth when our Indian team thrashes any other country( especially Pakistan) in cricket, we go berserk when a man of Indian origin makes a mark in the financial or literary world, when a woman of Indian descent goes to space (she may not have stayed in the country for a day). Wars have brought us together. We saw it during the Kargil episode. Yet our patriotism is fuzzy, unsure, sometimes accusative and definitely selective.

Hannay writes that the Muscovites (1958) were a proud lot and their sense of belonging to their city and state was over-powering. Public property was regarded as their personal property and kept clean and well-guarded. The pronoun "we" stands out in their conversation. “We built this road last year”, “We are working on  educational programs.”

The “we” sounds much better than the amorphous and anonymous “they”. Why do we like to shirk responsibility and utter “They litter the streets’, or “they should do something about it.” Should pointing our fingers at our neighbours and the Government become a matter of habit?

Stephen  Hannay writes that Russian children know a lot about their capital city---its history and geography, its architecture and its leaders. They can rattle off statistics from an early age about the weight of Catherine the Great‘s sleigh, the height of the ministerial buildings and even the length of a road. It may sound ridiculous but these small facts instil pride, pride that will make us forget that only Harijans are to clear the garbage, that scribbling on ancient monuments is not to be condoned and that it is more important to be conversant about the financial health of the nation than that of USA.  How many of our children know when the Saraighat Bridge was built over the Brahmaputra or who the Vice-president of India may be.   Should our children show interest only in statistics that approximate 36-26-36?

As a teacher I had once asked a seventh standard student who had written Gitanjali. “An old man with a white beard” was the reply I got. Does a Noble Laureate deserve such a fate in the hands of a twelve year old?

Why can’t we rise above caste and religious prejudices and unitedly declare “Mera Bharat is indeed Mahan”