Our days are hurried, our hours rushed. Our minutes are chock-full with demands on their seconds.
Time has become tight, stifled by torrents of commercial information, propaganda, and rhetoric. We can never be sure if something given to us as a fact is, in fact, a fact. Or if something shown as the truth, the whole truth, is anything but the truth.
We live in times when the line dividing the real from the false is so blurred as to make the two indistinguishable. This adds to worries about the virus, the changing climate, the loss of natural resources, the erosion of ecological integrity and values, and the rise in intolerance and hate.
‘Ayyo,’ I can hear a sharp 85-year-old Chennaivasi demur. ‘They have always been so. I do not know of a single year when we were without worries.’ Her stressing the ‘rr’ in that word carries conviction. Basically, this English-educated granny who is severely myopic, asthmatic, diabetic and has survived any number of blackouts and stumbles plus a nasty bout of Covid-19 is telling me: ‘Don’t complain about the virus’ refusal to go because no one wears masks. Coming from Rukmani-paatti, this means a lot. ‘Don’t shake your head at festivals and tamasha-s being held in the jaws of the pandemic,’ she continues. ‘Don’t moan about global warming and about… what is that place….Antarctica… melting, our glaciers thawing, our rivers getting polluted, dry.’ She tells me not to groan about corruption becoming a way of life, incompetence staying a hardy perennial, mediocrity rewarded, unworthiness anointed.
As I murmur disagreement and say something about a golden era that we had, about the scale of wrong-doing being much greater now, and about the challenges faced by democratic dissent and free speech, I am told by her: ‘Nothing doing. Don’t you remember how Sheikh Abdullah was jailed without trial for years and years, how that golden-hearted Namboodiripad’s top-class government in Kerala was sacked, and don’t you remember that Mundhra scandal in Nehru’s time? Don’t you remember how Rajaji was threatened with action for sedition—sedition, she repeats in accents of rage , waving her forefinger—for something he wrote in Swarajya on Kashmir, the countless dismissals of State Governments and impositions of President’s Rule, that infamous case…what was it called…Oh yes, the Nagarvala case and, of course, that blot of blots, the National Emergency, in Indira’s time? Did she not jail that sadhu in politics, Jayaprakash Narayan, till he was nearly dead?’ That last word is said in tones that remind me of a mortuary.
‘And as for…what do you call it…that type of capitalism in which certain people are favoured…’ ‘Crony?’ I ask. ‘Correct…crony…it was there then also…capitalism was very much there then and is also there now…only the cronies are different…Socialism was on paper then and is on paper now. We had good and bad people in all the good parties. Now we have good and bad people in all bad parties.’
Seeing my brow furrow up in doubt, she continues: ‘I am not justifying all that is happening now, thambi. I am only saying that for everything that is wrong today, there is a precedent in what you think was a golden era. That gold also had a lot of lead in it. And today’s lead is not all lead. That is all.’ And she says that ‘all’ with the aa in it stretched to its fullest acoustic scope, not as in ‘hall’ but in ‘aah’. It has finality.
But she has not done. ‘One thing more…look at this fuss about the national flag being hoisted on houses…The Prime Minister asked us to do what was only right and proper. In this 75th year of our freedom, do you expect him to say anything different about the flag? Whatever it is, I am going to plant it in my little garden. It is our freedom flag, our struggle’s flag, which we used to carry about singing Vande Mataram. It is our Gandhiji’s flag, Nehru’s and Subhas Bose’s flag. You have worked in Bengal. You know of Matangini Hazra…She died holding the flag aloft…She was shot…shot…holding that flag…We remember her…We of my generation…We must remember her and others like her on this anniversary… And I will in my broken voice hum Vande Mataram as I plant it…’
I say, ‘You don’t plant flags, paatti. You hoist them.’
‘Maybe…but I don’t have a flag pole. I will tie it to my tulasi plant…’
I salute her.
One does not argue with the age-honed Rukmani paatti-s of life. They are positive cynics. Not to be fooled into blind adulation by the testimony of all that was good and great in the past, not to be led into outright criticism by the evidence of all that is bad and ugly in the present. Such objective witnesses are precious and irreplaceable. They don’t come like that anymore.
But Rukmani paatti’s wisdom notwithstanding, and with due respect to her, it is vital that we be true to ourselves, to our times, in acknowledging our deep anxieties. And being true would mean acknowledging that there are millions who cannot be asked to be truer to themselves than they already are.
Can we ask an undertrial or a detenu to ‘be true to herself or himself’?
Can we ask someone from a minority who feels self-conscious, watched for conformity and for compliance to be true to herself or himself? That someone could be a Kashmiri Pandit in Baramulla, a Sunni in Mathura, a Roman Catholic in Nashik, a Dalit in Benares, a Sikh in Aligarh. ‘Be true to myself,’ such a person might respond with a pained laugh. ‘Can I wear what I want to, eat and drink what I want to, pray how I want to?’
Can we ask someone in our hill or forest or coastal areas, suffering the loss of livelihood because ‘ease of business’ or ‘development’ requires him to forfeit traditional vocations and rights, to ‘be true to herself or himself’? ‘Be true to myself? The only way I can be that is by saying loud and clear that my future and that of my children is in dire danger, that I want my means of livelihood to be protected against disasters—natural and manmade.’
Can we ask a free thinker, a writer or an artist to ‘be true to herself’? ‘What do you mean by “Be true?” she or he will say, ‘I am being true when I write, create. But I want to do and be that without having to account for what I do. I just want to be myself. I need to be that…myself…without being afraid of breaking some code, some law, some rule…In other words, be myself without fear?’ In truth, we cannot.
The late President of India, A P J Abdul Kalam, in his delightful interactions with students, asked: ‘Tell me children…what do you want to be?’ A forest of hands went up. One said ‘doctor’, another, ‘pilot’, a third, ‘actor’. The First Citizen was thrilled that not one said ‘politician’. But just when the session was giving over, a boy raised his hand. ‘Yes…tell me…’ said the President, ‘what do you want to be ?’ ‘Sir…I want to be… happy.’ The hall burst into applause, a beaming President of India leading.
Choice, the freedom and the opportunity to choose, is at the core of freedom which is the prerequisite for happiness.
In strictly election terminology, this means the right to say NOTA. None of the above.
To be able to say ‘not this, not that…’, ‘not that, not this…’ or ‘NOTA’, without anxiety, without fear of consequences, is democratic freedom. To be able to feel like praying, feel like not praying, to feel like praying in seclusion or congregationally and to be able to tell anyone who asks anything about one’s religious beliefs or un-beliefs— ‘Mind your business’, is religious freedom. To not have to prove one’s patriotism to the Right or one’s independence to the Left, but to have the freedom to take one’s stand anywhere—or nowhere—on a spectrum of choices, is the ultimate freedom.
The tricolour with its fourth colour—blue—at its centre in the Asokan wheel of dharma is about freedom, and justice, which includes justice for all those being wronged, is more than a flag. It is the Constitution aloft. It is the anthem unfurled.
And so, as Rukmani paatti and all of us who, with our Prime Minister leading us, raise or salute the national flag and sing the national anthem on August 15, it is that freedom of choice and of opportunity that we celebrate the joy of the freedom to be oneself as proud Indians. Not in some abject act of conformity, not to impress a neighbour or be in the good books of someone powerful and certainly not out of a sense of obligation but in the spirit of true Azadi or, in Tamil, viduthalai.
Gopalkrishna Gandhi
Former diplomat and former Governor, West Bengal