Happy Independence Day!

Here’s wishing a Happy Independence Day and Yaum-e-Azadi Mubarak to all Indians and Pakistanis around the world. And here’s hoping that, as two countries in their 60s, India and Pakistan can run their affairs with the wisdom and sagacity that should come with age.

 

We, who come from these great countries, are justly proud of our millennia-old culture – music, cuisine, art, architecture and literature. But we cannot, on the birth anniversaries of our nations, ignore what ails our societies. On either side of the border, inequity, poverty and violence are still prevalent. So what can we wish for our countries today? Rabindranath Tagore, in the Gitanjali, expressed his wishes thus:

 

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.

 

And while we hark back to Tagore, who penned India’s national anthem, let’s not forget another great poet of the subcontinent, Mohammed Iqbal. Indians know and love his poem Saare jahaan se achha Hindustan humara. And while it is true that Iqbal passed away well before 1947, his legacy is so much a part of Pakistan’s cultural, philosophical and intellectual history that he is the National Poet of Pakistan. If every Pakistani could embody even a fraction of Iqbal’s idea of khudi, Pakistan would be a better place. Just as India would be a better place if Indians went beyond paying lip service to India’s heroes.