ANNIVERSARIES are like scratch marks on the walls of time's prison, candles lit against the awesome night of Infinity. If human beings were immortal, we would have had no need for these self-congratulatory celebrations, these vainglorious displays of victory over mortality.
Which, in a way, describes my feelings as we as a nation approach our 50th anniversary. Is there a quality of terror mixed with the exultation? Is there an element of a race won by default? We're 50 years old, yes. But for how long after Independence have the "we" of India remained vibrant and inclusive? How many of us, since that dawn of Freedom, have basked under a shared sun?
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I know I'm not alone in feeling uncertain about the jubilee ahead of us. While for some Indians the miserable antics of greedy and despotic politicians are cause for despair, for others it's the growing lawlessness and breakdown of civic amenities. For me, flushed with delight from the news I'd won the Onassis award, it's the desolation I felt two days later, when I heard of Sanjoy Ghose's abduction by ULFA.
As I write this piece, a few days before August 15, there's still no real news about the whereabouts of this idealistic NGO leader who chose Assam as a focus for the development of rural communities. I've been friendly with his family for many years and know his mother Vijaya Ghose begged him to give up his plans. "Your surname is Bengali," she argued, "it doesn't matter how good your work is, how much you convince the terrorists there's no conflict of interests, you will not be believed."
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But like so many other mothers of her generation, she'd brought her children up to think of themselves as Indians, undistinguished by caste or community. Sanjoy could not believe in the forces of separatism arrayed against him, because he had from his earliest childhood been raised on a diet of inclusion and humanism. He went to Assam determined to prove mere surnames could never be an impediment to good work. In a sense, he was snatched because his ideals got in the way of his ability to recognise danger to himself.
Like him, I too was raised to believe India was one country; all Indians had an equal right to both the glories and the sorrows of our nation. Growing up outside India under the gilded umbrella of the Indian embassy, I only knew I was Indian. But back in India, in college, I learnt for the first time that other Indians saw themselves as Gujaratis, Bengalis, Christians, Parsis, Muslims, Brahmins, Kshatriyas, Nairs, Dalits, Marxists—anything, that is, other than the sort of "just Indian" I'd grown up believing I was. It was a painful and disturbing realisation because it immediately recreated, in what was supposed to be my own homeland, the same uneasy insecurities that caused so much heartache during my years as an Indian schoolgirl amongst children of other nations, some aggressively nat ionalistic, contemptuous of poor nations, of dark skins.
Since then, of course, I've recognised all human com munities make these distinctions. If they're not specifically along lines drawn by tradition, then by race financial success, by class superiority and raw ability, sex and age. All over the world, it seems, our species is testing the limits of its own definition of itself as a species Even as we declare ourselves different to the other creatures and plants with which we share this small, planet spinning around a minor star in the galaxy we the Milky Way, we seem determined to find so many differences amongst ourselves that we are able to slaughter one another with indiscriminate abandon.
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The bricks with which nations are built are the same which walls are raised between humans. The flags to which we owe allegiance become blindfolds of prejudice dividing people from one another. The anthems we sing for our culture sound like cruel taunts to those who stand outside the magic circle of citizenhood. It's hard to think of celebrating the 50th year of our freedom while there are so many of us who have nothing to celebrate, who are excluded from the festivities because of prejudice, ideology or poverty.
Rather than set aside one day to celebrate our nationhood, perhaps we should aim to set aside 365 days a year, every year, to dedicate to that task. Rather than limit ourselves to definitions of citizenship and culture, we should claim the larger horizons of unity: the sky, the solar system, the universe. Rather than be proud only of the Taj Mahal, we should aim for the day when we can be equally proud of the Great Wall of China, the Golden Gate Bridge and the Sydney Opera House. Our bodies might be limited by geography and history but our minds can touch the farthest corners of eternity.
