The Rediscovery of Past

The rediscovery of India
The country today needs to reinvent itself through the ideals and dreams that drove the Independence movement
Anniversaries chime, mime.
Repeating the sounds and the sentiments of the original event, they are meant to echo. But, mostly, they parody.
Days red-ringed on calendars are like Rose-ringed Parakeets. They please their “owners” by repeating what they have been drilled into doing.
The phrase signifying tedium — “year in and year out” — must come from the dull annuities of routine. Anniversaries placate routine. Repetition palliates nostalgia, packages and pots it.
Potted speeches, even stirring ones, seem “put on” when replayed to order. Archival photographs, even startling ones, seem to be serving another’s purpose when pulled out from their rest and streamed on today’s screens and surfaces.
August 15, for India, is no exception.
Many emotions
Catharsis surrounded that day in 1947. Joy and pain, triumph and tragedy were both in the air, like grey and silver clouds in astral combat. Ustad Bismillah Khan had played his mesmericshehnai on the Red Fort’s great mound minutes before Prime Minister Nehru, shy of nothing but of the age 60, by two years, sprang to his feet. Chest out, chin up, he freed with unconcealed elation India’s new flag from its furls of subordination. If there is one word that can describe the mood of that day, it is the much-used one about the much-missed spirit — idealism.
What would Jawaharlal Nehru have had to say to the nation today, if he stood on the ramparts of the Red Fort? He would of course be speaking in Hindustani with a sprinkling of Urdu words which today could sound archaic, such as sifat(quality), iman (probity), zamir (conscience). But assuming he were to turn to English, Nehru’s 2013 message to the Indian people might go thus:
“Friends and comrades, I have had the great privilege, for it is no less, and the joy, for that is what it has been, to speak to you from atop these historic walls...