Posted by Shreya on Monday June 19, @04:00AM
Your love for your country binds you to sing patriotic ballads, as you sit sweating in a heat blasted room, waiting for the electricity supply to resume..
In his latest novel, Salman Rushdie claims that we live in a country where nothing runs; from taps to car a/c's. Yet,our love for the country forces us to sing patriotic ballads as we sit sweating in a heat blasted room for the electricity supply to resume.
No doubt we can identify with all these problems, which throng a commoner's daily life in our country. We can, at any point of time finger atleast ten things that are wrong with the system. We face governments which last for 13 days, and we daily witness a parliament where the representatives of the country squabble like street dogs. Every day we walk down the roads, apprehensive of the butcherous traffic, which unannounced may anyday, engulf our existence or detain us anytime from reaching our destiny.
Yet, meet a foriegner who voices these fallacies aloud, and BANG! comes our patriotic zeal to the rescue. You retaliate with an explosion of furious explanations, denials,and counterattacks, never to mention the grudge you come to bear against the complainer.
It's all in the play, and not only for our country, which we claim to be based on too much love and values, it's true also of places where attachments are seen as curbs on the freedom. And it makes one wonder: what makes those lines; arbitrarily sketched on the globe so important that you not only zealously guard it's prestige with a verbal panorama, but also give up your life for it's sake.
In small parts of this oblivious planet of this Herculean universe, we confine ourselves into regions bound by these lines and delimit our horizons. We do not know much of the entities that stretches beyond this globe, yet,we divide this small lil' sphere into countless divisions that stare contemptiously into each others' hostile eyes.
The concept of the ideal world as sketched by the originators of world organisations, lies distorted by the members of the very same. If we really want to live in a world that matches those concepts, it is most important; I think; to bring to end this ever raging hostility that handicaps us, or the energies shall continue to be wasted on bloody wars between Nations.
What stayed with you?
A line that lingered, a feeling, a disagreement. Great comments are as valuable as the original piece.