Conviction

Tanha rahi apni raah chalta jaayega,
Ab to jo bhi hoga dekha jaayega.

Jodi tor dak shune keu naa aashe,
Tobe ekla cholo re.

Something stirs. Or does it? It is not about Rang De Basanti, which I saw today. It is a film of extremes, a vision of country, painted on celluloid. I'll admit I liked it but I'll not analyze it. Let me instead talk about something closer to my heart.

Oh no! Not that again. Don't worry, it's not 'that,' again. Though it is related in a very beautiful way, I'll not talk about that relation either. I have seen posts on this earlier on other blogs, and big debates and what not. This is not my answer, or my question. It is a mess inside my head really, but let me try to spill my guts out.

Define India.

Put her in one word? A couple of words? A paragraph? An essay? A book? A few thousand books? My India, your India, his India, her India? States, cities, languages, religions? BPO's, steel plants, jute mills, fisheries? Villages, naxals, freedom, democracy? Poverty, population, corruption, illiteracy? Girl child, communalism, communism, AIDS? B. R. Ambedkar, Adi Shankaracharya, Buddha, Akbar?

Okay, that's enough! I cannot, as you see put my finger on what defines India. She's neither just the sum of her borders nor just a head count. Questions like, are NRI's less Indian, or should every Indian know Hindi, or should we go to the moon when there is nobody to feed countless millions, or will the IT boom die, do not even scratch the surface. She is all that. She is more. She lives and breathes, in each of us. She is in the freight carried on the many trains, in the trains which run on the tracks, in the tracks laid by the Railways and in the minister who heads the Railways. She is as much in the Raj, as in the Mughals, as in the Mauryas, as in Vasco da Gama, as in 1947.

Utopian? Maybe. But the very less of what I understand of her, and the slightly more of that I feel, forces me to conclude thus. I do not know whether this country needs a revolution or not, or whether we are an elected dictatorship or a forced democracy. I do not know whether you should fight the 'system,' or condemn it and run away. But I do know, she needs us to believe. And the sooner we get this the better. This is not a solution to any problem we face today, nor is it the last ball of a cricket match. It is about what all the annals of history scream at you, what you'll find inside if you look at yourselves closely enough. It is about a conviction. It is about...

One.