Huge relief: We're not the only people to resent our national anthem

Rajasthan governor and the BJP leader Kalyan Singh's recent proposal to change the national anthem, is not unusual. After digging into some history, I realise, every country down time has had wild chestnuts periodically popping up and questioning the national anthem. It's a common human trait. So that's fine.

Of course, replacing "adhinayaka" with "mangal dayaka," as Singh suggests, is a very bad idea. Try singing and you won't be able to: the phonetics don't match. But since Singh is no poet, the nation can trash it at pleasure.

You can also trash the former Supreme Court justice, Markandey Katju's blog, where he has been repeatedly calling Rabindranath Tagore "a stooge." He is convinced that "Jana Gana Mana," was a product of "sycophancy" - just because Tagore had composed the song in December 1911. And that was the very month emperor George V had come to India.

Misleading and inadequate reading - something we don't expect from a former judge who used to quote Mimansa Shastra in court, much to the bafflement of lawyers. Tagore had written in a 1937 letter that "neither the Fifth nor the Sixth nor any George could be the maker of human destiny through the ages… I had hailed in the song Jana Gana Mana that Dispenser of India's destiny who guides, through all rise and fall…" That is, God in humanity. In 1939, he had written, "I should only insult myself if I cared to answer those who consider me capable of such unbounded stupidity".

Many others have questioned Jana Gana Mana for not including their state's name. For instance, the Assam MP Kumar Deepak Das in 2011. An answer to such claims was provided by the Supreme Court in 2005, when a petition was filed to include Kashmir and delete Sindh (the Sindhis in India were, not surprisingly, up in arms.) The national anthem is "not a chronicle which defines the territory of the nation," the court had ruled.

But it's not just India. The French football players are regularly upbraided for not singing along to the anthem, "La Marseillaise". Last year, justice minister Christiane Taubira was censure for not singing the anthem. Taubira Facebooked: "Some occasions are more suitable for contemplation… Than stage karaoke." Of course, #LaMarseillaise trended on Twitter.

In the US, last year, a rock version of the "Star Spangled Banner" by rock band Madison Rising, had everyone in splits. It was so "spectacularly awful". Nothing new for America, where at least a dozen such unorthodox interpretations dog the national anthem - from Jimi Hendrix in 1969 to Lady Gaga in 2013.

In Germany, the growing influx of immigrants is reflected in football and in its national anthem, with controversies stirring up every now and then over their refusal to sing the "Deutschlandlied" or "The Song of the Germans" - a shortened version of the original that began "Deutsch land, Deutschland über alles" ("Germany, Germany above all").

At the end of the day, the idea of the nation is imagined. As the political scientist Benedict Anderson wrote in his influential book, Imagined Communities, a nation is an imagined thing: We never meet every citizen, or even hear of them, yet in every mind there is an image of all of us together. Everyone may imagine it differently. It's perhaps best to hear all the talk over national anthems, shrug and then move on, as most Americans do these days.