This Independence Day, as the tricolour flutters in the breeze, do your thoughts travel to the quality of the air? As all five of our senses get assaulted at some point or the other by some form of muck, do you miss the one sense that 61 years of independence has not been able to activate—our civic sense?
Could some answers lie here?
- Papa Ko Kehne Do: Indians need authority figures to tell them what to do. Given how little self-confidence we have as a people—our derivative popular films and music, and looking-to-the-West-for-approval fiction provide enough evidence of this—perhaps we are unable to think as individuals what good social behaviour is. So, as the cliche goes, we will litter in Shivaji Nagar with poise, but turn into mice in Singapore. Abroad, we will follow every rule not out of sensitivity for others, but from fear of the consequences of breaking rules.
- Eeswar, Allah Tere Naam: With so many gods decorating our religious landscape, how can chaos be far behind? How can bhagwan Ram's joyous return to Ayodhya after 14 years not warrant ear-splitting mayhem, year after year? The old and sick need to loosen up perhaps, the very young need to be properly initiated into the glories of the land they have been fortunate to be born in. Hazardous splinters? What is a little danger on a day of such universal joy?
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Is it that Our ideological proximity to the gods give us the divine sanction to be unhygienic and anti-social?
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- Main Azaad Hoon: So much freedom and how wonderfully we use it. We're free to hurl garbage into the public street or our neighbour's yard. We're free to spit with abandon from rickshaw drivers' seats and expensive cars. We're free to honk in the middle of the night to ask the nightwatchman to open the gate. We're free to urinate wherever a little foliage can camouflage our intent, and sometimes even that is not necessary. We're free to whistle and clap and talk noisily during the film screening. We're free to have our mobile ringing in a darkened cinema theatre. And on being asked to not speak on the mobile during the screening, we're free to say, "But it's important!" or "I have paid for my ticket, so you shut up!" or even, "But...I am talking about the film only!"
Local, 2005
Hulla
