Freedumb

We are a free country, a country free from the cruel hands of foreign rule. We are free to lead a sovereign life, to voice our thoughts, to express our opinions through our deeds, to breathe, to live. We are free to make movies, to eat and drink, to love, to innovate, to produce, to understand, to get and to give. We are free!

Yet, my heart believes it not, that we are absolutely free. It seems to me that most of us are free to take everything, including our freedom, for granted. We are free to spit on the walls and pavements, free to stick gum on benches, free to sweep our dust onto the neighbour’s doormat, free to let our children throw banana peels out the car window, free to urinate by the street, just outside the public urinal, free to test the endurance of all public benefit objects by pelting them with stones, free to forget our national anthem, free to prove that our worth is in abandoning everything Indian, free to endanger the lives of millions of people with drunken driving, free to test the patience of tourists, free to loot, free to rob, free to murder, free to misbehave, free to ridicule, free to criticize, free to discriminate, free to work at our whims, and free to blame the government for all of the above.
We are free – only to be clutched more tightly by the handcuffs of anger, jealousy, greed, lust for power, loss of humanism and the loss of our very soul!

The freedom to elect our government came as an immediate aftermath of our gaining independence. But did it bring with it the intelligence to be able to elect an effective government? Ironically, it did bring along the freedom to curse the government we have elected, to refute the corruption seeds of which we have sown, to let everything go on as badly as ever, as long as we individually do not receive any immediate harm.

The freedom of expression of thought is a fundamental right. We are entitled to forums to voice our views, problems and ideas. We are free to have television channels deliver the truth at our doorstep, movies and the media to entertain us. Yet, are we free from the indignity of having to cross any limits in competition? Are we free from the immature mindsets and useless, and all the more detrimental, customs prevalent in society? Are we free from badly informed, irresponsibly fast and sensation-obsessed news channels, whose journalist can film a man burning himself in public, but cannot try to put out the fire, let alone prevent him from doing so? Are we free from endless sob stories that are wasting away the minds of a large section of our population every afternoon, by promoting illogical and unrealistic stories as something going on in every household? No wonder, many women and, contrary to common belief, men are convinced that this is some form of entertainment.

We are free to be educated and to educate. Education means being able to comprehend life and earn ourselves a living, not just live it but love it too. But education has acquired a new meaning today. It means to get good marks in an unnecessarily over-hyped written examination that hardly requires any skill more than cramming ability. Morality is now unheard of (kis chidiya ka naam hai, they say in Hindi) and etiquette perhaps has lost its way in a web of confused and half-hearted teachers. Education is your percentage of marks mentioned on a fragile sheet of paper, which apparently represents your future.

I ask, do you still think we are FREE? Do you still think we have the right kind of freedom, if at all we have any? I think the kind of freedom we seem to be enjoying right now needs to be rephrased FREEDUMB because this freedom is of no use, for we are entangled in the sticky threads of nonsense. They ask why do we not progress, as much as is our potential? But do they realize what progress needs? Look into yourself; are you the free bird that soars in the sky? Have you not been grappling in quicksand, which now you’ve even started enjoying? Cut those sticky threads with your teeth. Think of what you can do to your own self, if your country progresses. Waste not your time in pointless arguments about correcting that which makes no significant difference – correct that which is in you, which is all you have, which is what makes you, and makes all the difference. Don’t be dumb in exercising your freedom. Use it to make yourself see an India that can, for a change, be proud of its people, rather than you claiming to be proud of a country that has lost all its dignity because it’s been stripped all the while that its people have praised it.

I invite your comments and what you feel on the same topic - not necessarily supporting my opinion.