Where the mind is without fear...

Where the mind is without fear and the head is held high
Where knowledge is free
Where the world has not been broken up into fragments
By narrow domestic walls
Where words come out from the depth of truth
Where tireless striving stretches its arms towards perfection
Where the clear stream of reason has not lost its way
Into the dreary desert sand of dead habit
Where the mind is led forward by thee
Into ever-widening thought and action
Into that heaven of freedom, my Father, let my country awake
-Rabindranath Tagore

Tagore always had a way with words. No wonder, they gave him the Nobel for Gitanjali. His plea to the Almighty resounds even in today's mindless cackle and cacophony, merely because it's a entreaty from the heart, from the soul. Every Independence and Republic Day, people salute the flag, sing patriotic songs, make great speeches about freedom, the sacrifices that our freedom fighters made, and how we must safeguard it. And that's that. No really, I am not accusing the Indian people of being unpatriotic. But there's more to patriotism than saying "Mera Bharat Mahaan".

Making big speeches about freedom, its importance, and our duties towards the nation is all well and good, but we must comprehend this basic fact. No freedom is absolute. No liberty is ever unrestricted. It is an irony, but it is the truth. Mind you, liberalism is all nice on paper, but in principle, its conservatism that's fashionable. And why wouldn't it be so? Alexander Solzhenitsyn once said, "Unrestrained freedom exists for the press, but not for the readership, because newspapers mostly transmit in a forceful and emphatic way those opinions, which do not too openly contradict their own, and that general trend." If the so-called vanguards of freedom, of liberty should resort to such double standards, then why single out the bureaucracy or the politicians for criticism?

Just on Sunday, two young ladies were attacked by a drug addict, a morally deranged individual, in a prominent tourist spot in Mumbai. One lady had a throat cut, while the other suffered wounds on her head, and her hands. And while this happened, what were our "free" people doing? Watching the tamasha, as one would say. Just two gentlemen had the sense to attempt to assist the victims. And what was the press doing while this was happening? Clicking away to glory! This isn't freedom, this isn't independence. This is a mockery of all that those involved in the freedom struggle bore for us. That in such a prominent spot a man could so brazenly attack a woman, and then proceed to knife her companion, and that no one should even bother to assist them, is not just shocking, it's downright deplorable.
And that the companion yelled out, "We are not foreigners. We are Indians.", hoping that this might elicit some assistance, is to me the most shameful of all things. That someone in need has to convince you of his/her identity before you decide to help him/her speaks a lot about your character. And yet we exult over being independent for 58 years!

Tagore's poem remains a hope that things will change, that they will improve. Maybe things will progress from just lip service to true altruism. We cannot afford to wait another 58 years for that.