A true national hero can make us proud
By Shashi Tharoor
Weekly Column "Shashi on Sunday" in "The Times of India"
August 17, 2008

We've turned 61. One more Independence Day has gone by. Thirty-three years ago, when i was fresh out of college and about to proceed to the United States for post-graduate studies, a leading national newspaper asked me to do an article for their Independence Day supplement. The Emergency had just been declared; politicians had been locked up, the press censored; even one of my short stories had been banned. Around me, newspapermen and journalists were cowed and resentful. The freedoms for which our independence struggle had been waged seemed in peril, and yet weren't we, the literate minority, disqualified by our privileged status from objecting to measures designed, as the government claimed, to benefit the "common man"?

I was angry, cynical and confused — a combination of emotions appropriate both to my age, and to the times. This is how i began my article: "Independent India is 28 years old today. I was 19 a few months ago. In school they told me i was the citizen of tomorrow. Around me i saw the citizens of today, and wondered what purpose i was going to serve. They seemed worn and jaded and cynical. To my fellow-citizens-of-the-future, Independence Day merely meant early mornings in starched uniforms on parade grounds, relieved only by the comforting thought of no more classes. In college they were more sensible. They just gave us a holiday, and the chowkidar unfurled the flag."

But even collegiate cynicism had its limits. "Independence," i went on in adolescent passion, "conjures up visions of mammoth patriotic rallies outside Red Fort; a reminder of freedom and self-reliance and the hope of unexploited progress. But when the drums have been beaten and the cavalcade has passed, the cheering invariably seems to subside into a desultory grumble. Our capacity for unproductive complaint is seemingly limitless; but then we appear to have developed the art of destructive criticism to the proportions of a national characteristic. Perhaps it is because, as a former colony, we are used to bemoaning our lot without being able to do anything about it." Decrying "the strange spectacle of a nation without nationals, of Indians who are not involved in India," I lamented the absence of a "sense of belonging" to a larger idea of India. I argued: "That one is an all-too-dispensable part (of the Indian reality) is surely all the more reason why one should take one's role all the more seriously, instead of affecting the dislocated detachment that has become the untaxed perquisite of citizenship." That was my point: we had to belong, we had to care, we had to be involved in what became of our independence. This "sense of belonging" (the phrase with which i titled the article) would be vital "to me and those of my generation who now stand on the threshold of that which has, over the last 28 years, been made to mean so little."

That generation is now in its prime, and it is only fair to ask whether our sense of belonging is any greater now than it seemed to be amongst those who were the age we are now. They suffered by comparison with their parents, who had fought for and won the very independence whose value they seemed to be frittering away. How do we seem now to the generation following ours? If, 28 years after 1947, independence had "been made to mean so little", does it mean much more today, 61 years on?

At one level, yes. The idea of India has come to mean much more today than it did then. Even if we are six decades removed from the magic moment of that "tryst with destiny", we have weathered four wars and an Emergency, conducted 13 general elections and hundreds of state elections, changed our governments peacefully, defused separatist movements in places as far afield as Punjab and Mizoram, and seen Rashtrapati Bhavan occupied by three Muslims, a Dalit and a woman. Bollywood, yoga and chicken tikka masala have conquered the globe; we have won two cricket World Cups and invented the IPL. And the mass media have brought us all together in the nationalism of shared experience: We have watched officials stung on camera, applauded stirring moments on the sports field, screamed a collective "Chak De" and mourned together for the victims of Kargil. The Information Age has given Indians a greater sense of who we are: a raucous and disorderly people led by a soft-spoken economist, a multi-religious people united by the Mahabharat on television, a land of IIT graduates with a third of the world's illiterate children. "We are like this only," goes the wry line, as we acknowledge the paradoxes i have already outlined in this space (November 25, 2007). We are large, we contain multitudes.

And yet, there's something missing. I got a taste of it in the reaction of many readers to my column last week, which ended with a paean to pride in being Indian. In what are we to take pride, one emailer savagely asked: in holding the world record for farmer suicides? In MPs waving rupee notes about in Parliament? In dowry deaths, communal riots, the massacres in Gujarat? My answer was not to deny all these, but to take pride in our country having survived them all. We can learn from our failures; we can be proud of being able to discuss them in a free society, and proud of being able to surmount them in a democracy.

But even as i write those words, i know that isn't enough. A system is easily taken for granted. What the nation wants is heroes. We see this in the adulation all India gives a Tendulkar or a Dhoni, or for that matter an SRK or a Rajnikanth, and in our willingness to deify a Kalpana Chawla, a Sunita Williams, or even a Bobby Jindal. India yearns for the individual Indian who can transcend the dross, the star dazzling amidst the clouds, the eagle soaring above the mundane. Our need is profound, for the success of one Indian vindicates the rest of us by association, and inspires us to hope that we can be better than all the shameful things around us.

So India's is a simple cry, unheeded by too many of those who seek to lead our country: make us proud. Please.