Skip to main content

My national pride swells

Who is taller? Image courtesy Hindustan Times


I feel proud to belong to the country that boasts of the tallest statue in the world. Silly countrymen tell me that the amount of money spent on that statue is far more than the entire annual tax revenue of many states in the country. They argue that while China is spending money on railroads across oceans, we are inane to spend it on a statue for vultures to ensconce themselves.

I liked the metaphor of vultures though I think that it is quite antinational in the context. Was Shah Jahan a vulture when he built the Taj Mahal while a lion’s share of his population lived in leaky huts? Shah Jahan spent the country’s wealth on things like the Peacock Throne which was embedded with the most coveted diamonds and pearls. Though the throne vanished from history like many other things, the mausoleum remains. Through that mausoleum Shah Jahan remains.

The tallest statue in the world is our own cultural emperor’s ingenious strategy to remain embedded in the history of the country. Shouldn’t we be proud of such a ruler? I ask these country people who question the worth of the statue. Then they tell me that it was Mahatma Gandhi who actually deserved the honour for unification of the country. Not that the Sardar was not great. There were a lot of great men in those days. Quite a lot compared to today. Didn’t the Mahatma tower above them all? They ask me.  Moreover, he was a Gujarati too if you consider the patriotism of a Gujarati who initiated the construction of the statue in the first place.

That’s where you are wrong, I tell them. There are other factors too. Can one who belonged and still belongs at heart to an organisation that was largely responsible for the assassination of a man put up the statue of that same man? A statue was required to proclaim the glory of the emperor, a statue that would span the sky and edify spectators from the moon. Next time when the kingdom of Bharat sends an astronaut to the moon and the emperor asks him what Bharat looked like from the lunar beams, the astronaut should say: “Saare jahaan se lamba Patel ji ka pratima!” My nationalist pride would swell through my veins then.

The countrymen called me all kinds of names. When prices of all essential commodities keep rising day by day and move beyond the reach of the common man, how dare I speak of nationalism? They asked me. They cited the example of the latest rise in the price of cooking gas: the sixth rise in 5 months, they reminded me.

Think of the Taj Mahal and the Peacock Throne, man, I told them. People paid their last penny, their last drop of blood and sweat, their everything for those icons of national pride. Can’t we be at least as civilised as those medieval people? Ah, I am left to lament: what kind of country men are these! Ignoramuses who have no notion of national pride!




Top post on IndiBlogger, the biggest community of Indian Bloggers

Comments

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

The Adventures of Toto as a comic strip

  'The Adventures of Toto' is an amusing story by Ruskin Bond. It is prescribed as a lesson in CBSE's English course for class 9. Maggie asked her students to do a project on some of the lessons and Femi George's work is what I would like to present here. Femi converted the story into a beautiful comic strip. Her work will speak for itself and let me present it below.  Femi George Student of Carmel Public School, Vazhakulam, Kerala Similar post: The Little Girl
47 comments
Read more

The Little Girl

The Little Girl is a short story by Katherine Mansfield given in the class 9 English course of NCERT. Maggie gave an assignment to her students based on the story and one of her students, Athena Baby Sabu, presented a brilliant job. She converted the story into a delightful comic strip. Mansfield tells the story of Kezia who is the eponymous little girl. Kezia is scared of her father who wields a lot of control on the entire family. She is punished severely for an unwitting mistake which makes her even more scared of her father. Her grandmother is fond of her and is her emotional succour. The grandmother is away from home one day with Kezia's mother who is hospitalised. Kezia gets her usual nightmare and is terrified. There is no one at home to console her except her father from whom she does not expect any consolation. But the father rises to the occasion and lets the little girl sleep beside him that night. She rests her head on her father's chest and can feel his heart...
18 comments
Read more

The Vegetarian

Book Review Title: The Vegetarian Author: Han Kang Translator: Deborah Smith [from Korean] Publisher: Granta, London, 2018 Pages: 183 Insanity can provide infinite opportunities to a novelist. The protagonist of Nobel laureate Han Kang’s Booker-winner novel, The Vegetarian , thinks of herself as a tree. One can argue with ample logic and conviction that trees are far better than humans. “Trees are like brothers and sisters,” Yeong-hye, the protagonist, says. She identifies herself with the trees and turns vegetarian one day. Worse, she gives up all food eventually. Of course, she ends up in a mental hospital. The Vegetarian tells Yeong-hye’s tragic story on the surface. Below that surface, it raises too many questions that leave us pondering deeply. What does it mean to be human? Must humanity always entail violence? Is madness a form of truth, a more profound truth than sanity’s wisdom? In the disturbing world of this novel, trees represent peace, stillness, and nonviol...
6 comments
Read more

The RSS does not exist

An organisation that has 80,000 branches in India does not exist legally in any document. This is the cover story of The Caravan this month. By the way, The Caravan is one of the very few publications that still continues to exist in spite of being overtly critical of Narendra Modi and his Sangh Parivar. The Rashtriya Swayamsevak Sangh (RSS) is not registered as an organisation under any of the usual Indian registration laws such as the Societies Registration Act or as a trust or company. It functions as an unregistered voluntary organisation, though it is arguably the largest public organisation in the country. This situation makes the organisation absolutely unaccountable to anyone, argues The Caravan . The RSS is not legally required to file annual returns to the Tax department or disclose its financial details publicly though it deals with thousands of crores of rupees every year especially after Modi became the Prime Minister of the country. The membership of the organisat...
12 comments
Read more

No Problems Only Opportunities

You’ve probably heard this joke. A young man walked into his office one morning and found a beautiful young lady sitting in his chair. He called the MD and said, “Sir, I have a problem.” The MD replied, “Don’t you know our company’s motto, young man? No Problems, Only Opportunities .” When Suchita of The Blogchatter sent me a mail with the topic of this week’s blog hop –  - the first thing that came to my mind was the above joke. I know many people – too many, in fact – who went through terrible problems. My own life was a series of problems in none of which was there the consolation of any beautiful woman. One essential lesson I learnt from life is that life is a series of problems. You solve one and then arises the next one. Now I have reached an age when problems are no more problems: they are life itself. If you ask me what was the biggest problem I ever dealt with, it was my last years in Shillong. I was a lecturer in a college drawing a fat salary stipulated by the U...
13 comments
Read more