Vande Mataram!

First post after exactly 3 months! What a happy coincidence that I get to record my thoughts on India's 60th Independence Day.

I have been a mute witness to this years independence celebrations, sitting in far away UK. Lost in my work, trying to finish up, I have been catching murmurs of happenings back home through TV channels telecated on the internet and from the buzz in the UK media. India is everywhere these days- our democracy, our industry, our culture, our spirituality are the headlines. It feels nice, to experience this new tilt of the world's attention towards our worldview. What in the 90's, appeared so clear to us, almost commonsense, was not accepted by the world- our perspectives were scorn-worthy by default, be it on nation, society, religion or culture. We were just another poor and destitute people trying assert our views almost only to balance our immense inferiority complex. All that has changed today. It also feels proud that we are finally attempting to live up to the dream we held up in '47, finally walking on our 'tryst with destiny'. We always knew India is special- it has been since ages- but with all her potential slumbering, and the great flames of the fire that She was reduced to mere embers smothering faint behind ashes, it was hard to accept and convince others, even more so. But today its different: a vibrant, rejuvenated India is there for all to see. The glory is already foreshadowed.

So this morning I settled for a minds-eye flaghoisting with the anthem playing in the bakground on my laptop. That was it for this 60th year eve for me. But 10 years ago in 1997, I was a direct participant to the 50th year celebrations, which were widespread and left a profound impression on me. Waves of joy erupted recounting what the freedom fighters had done to achieve Swaraj (a word much richer in meaning than 'self-rule'). At that time, I had little acquaintance with the spiritual side of the struggle, the men who heraled that movement and what inspired them. And at that time, the under-achieving, under-performing and often neglected giant of a nation was hardly the denouement that the founders of the nation would have dreamed to happen 50 years on.

Since then, as India marched on breaking Her shackles one by one, I too have made a personal journey to the source of the national river and back. Today, with the thirst of the soul satisfied by those refreshing waters, life moves on, towards that goal which inspired this nation from millennia and which I sighted at that source. Now I can see a bit more clearly, what Swami Vivekananda spoke in the 1890's about 'the ancient mother rejuvenated and seated on Her trhone'. Now I can see that the heralding of the free India falling on the birth day of the spiritual savant Sri Aurbindo was perhaps no coincidence. This is the task and the goal for the next 60 years- undoing the legacy of colonialism and defeat on the Indian mind, so that the knowldege this nation held so dearly in Her bosom over millennia, even if only in Her chest when She cowered in an outwardly abject half-sleep during Her slavery, might spread forth once again and help mankind on its onward march.