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What does it mean to be patriotic?

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Valson Thampu
Valson ThampuNov 07, 2016 | 12:32

What does it mean to be patriotic?

I'm afraid I feel jaded these days. Nearly nauseated. The undeviating flatness of life hacks my nerves. The nightmare is that this is being accepted as normal!

No, the life I have known is an ever-renewing thing. Like the wind that blows from the heart of the primeval forest.

- Like the breeze that comes gliding over the backwaters. Like the buds that open and lavish their fragrance on the valley.

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- Like the taintless azure of the sky, seen from atop the Himalayas.

- Like the water that trickles down from Gangotri, before man gets hold of it with iron hands of pollution.

Life is becoming like the mouthing of party spokesmen. You can predict what they will say before they open their mouths. Well, that's it. They open mouths, not minds. Mouths speak into mouths: two caves in communion. Mouths are not known to be wombs of originality.

Every spokesperson speaks identically. Not just the sentiments. Not just the words. Even the syntax. As though human beings are no more than robots that render pre-recorded messages. As though spokesmen are disallowed to think or feel. As though speaking and thinking are contrary to each other.

Canned words meet with conned sentiments. It is called talk-show. In the days of our innocence, talking was not a show. It was an experience. Think of talk-shows! We must at least appreciate the candour. There is no pretension, no hypocrisy, here.

Here is the heart of the matter. Media works - voluntarily or otherwise - on a narrow strip of contemporary life. It is what Jane Austen was accused of, limiting herself to the two-inch square of social ivory. What happens to 99 per cent of our people is not visible through the media lens.

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This woeful reduction in social canvas is burdened by the extreme expansion of media canvas. It is like having to spread a bottle of perfume over the whole of the subcontinent! Given that, the electronic media today is pulling off a miracle.

But it is a pointless miracle. A spurious and gratuitous miracle. It is like me touching my nose not only around my neck but also around the Sultanate of Brunei. Why can't the media afford us a touch of freshness by enlarging its canvas of engagement?

Come on, life is much more than Shivpal Yadavs, Rahul Gandhis, Nawaz Sharifs, some nondescript terrorist-handlers, a few bombs here and a fusillade of fire-fights there. We want to live. Our problems are many. And life is great! To us it is a privilege to be alive. We find no heroism in perishing before time.

How we wish you had cameras sensitive enough to capture the colours of our hearts when we make love. You had ears to hear how our women scream in otherworldly pain as they labour and bring new lives into this world. And the sense to know they cry over the dark clouds of uncertainty overshadowing the cradles of their newborn.

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How we wish you had scribes whose imagination could cope with the grandeur of our souls when we fondle our children or the anxieties that torment us as we wait till they come back safely from school.

How we wish you had time enough to come and see the serenity in our huts when, despite poverty, we sit together and eat our night meals, and retire, half-hungry, to wake up to another day of struggle and deprivation. How we wish!

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Come on, life is much more than Shivpal Yadavs, Rahul Gandhis, Nawaz Sharifs...

You don't have to ask ten people to know that the elite sections of society languish in ennui: a sort of tiredness, a delicate, tepid taste in the mouth, a touch of weariness about nothing in particular and the desperate need to be entertained.

To our fellow human beings living afflicted in this fashion - deprivation worse than the privation of poverty - everything has to be of stimulation value. Take patriotism, for example. What does it mean to be patriotic?

Is it only affording oneself a few moments of excitement when soldiers are "martyred" at the borders? Or, will such patriotism also include the willingness to suffer a little inconvenience or loss for the sake of the country?

I remember the December of 1971. Delhi was under curfew for only a fortnight. Everybody was cursing it. How people heaved a sigh of relief when the war ended! And Delhi did not even have a scratch from the war!! Such was our patriotism.

What is the difference? The patriots we are, we don't want war to come home. We are happy to enjoy it at a distance. We get inflated with fervour when the lives of the poor are sacrificed so that our skin may be spared.

It does not occur to us to ask: What does my patriotism mean to the jawans on the border who don't know if they will survive the night to celebrate sunrise the next day.

To the widows of slain soldiers, to the orphaned children, to the aged parents? Some of them nursing the heartbreak that their husbands, fathers, sons would not perhaps have died if proper and timely medical attention was provided to them.

To the mother of the young officer who was asked to pay a bribe to get a replica of her son's badge of honour she lost from her custody to a thief? (Those officials too will line up, make no doubt, as patriots when it is expedient to do so.)

To the youth of the country whose problems remain: poor education infrastructure, callous fingers of governance, diminishing employability and so on? And now, cities that choke them with pollution?  

To the crores and crores of BPL citizens who find their lives impoverished almost daily?

To the retired persons whose income, dependent wholly on interest rates, find themselves squeezed on the one side by declining interest-rates and, on the other, by spiralling inflation levels and the cheapening rupee?

To sensitive souls who feel suffocated by the ascendancy of the crude and the repetitive, by the suppression of human spontaneity, and by the approximation of the human to the mechanical?

We do not need to be coerced to love our motherland! Loving my country comes naturally to me. What needs to be done is to not interfere with it. Do not, for God's sake, poison the deep love I have for my motherland which has endured all this while, in spite of politicians and the wheeler-dealers of sentiments.

As a rule, only those who undermine the basis for sincere patriotism will invent the need to thrust patriotism on others. Patriotism, to say the very least, should not be degraded into an infliction! Let it stay a state of happiness, of quiet, steadfast pride.

Only when this happiness is undermined, the illusion raises it head that not many can be patriotic, and therefore it needs to be slammed down on reluctant customers. Truth to tell, the common man is more patriotic than the henchmen of patriotism.

From a cultural point of view, this woodenness of sensibility, this petrifaction of imagination, is a cause for deep worry. The goal of good governance is to enrich public life. Politics is not only a science but also an art.

As science, it must make reason prevail. As art it must safeguard the beauty of life. There cannot be a culture of good governance without a commitment to life based on reason and marked by respect for its beauty.

Citizens are not only pockets, mouths and stomachs, contrary to the dogma that underlies the current paradigm of development. We need bread. But we also need a world beyond bread: the world of beauty, of values, of ideals, of living in harmony together, loving and being loved beyond all barriers and labels.

We need to feel that we belong together as citizens of this great country. Only in this pond of national togetherness can the lotus of patriotism sprout and blossom. Let a thousand lotuses blossom!

Last updated: November 07, 2016 | 12:32
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