The Day Gandhi Lived
It was time for Bapus Prayer. He
told people not to fuss over him as he got up and moved ahead thru the crowed
of his followers. Nathuram was waiting to shoot but he froze as the sight of so
many people surrounding Gandhiji. He simply folded his hands meekly; looked at Gandhiji,
turned and walked away.
What our nation would be like, I wonder;
had this sequence of events played out on 30th Jan 1948. What sort
of collective conscious, we as a people, would have achieved, had Gandhiji
lived on. While the mahatma was known to have the steadfastness to fast &
repent till masses saw the right way; would this have continued to hold good.
Or we would have learned to squabble over petty gains of land, wealth irrespective
of his presence & guidance for many more years.
Would our political masters still
be clamoring for houses in prime locations, red beacons satisfying their sense
of egos, while the people they govern continue to suffer without clothes, shelter,
food? Would their need for increased guards & servants continue to eat away
our earnings, while the same security beat and torment the bourgeois? Maybe the
mahatma would have been able to inspire the second generation of leaders to put
the country and people before themselves. Maybe we could have been a nation of
selfless leaders and responsible citizens.
What we lost on the day Gandhiji
died was not only the father of our nation but also the keeper of our nation’s conscious.
We lost him when we most needed him; in the per-adolescence years of our
country. The turmoil our nation has undergone off late is probably indicative
of a poor upbringing we had as a nation. The muck of corruption & rapes and
the general sense of a lack of direction makes me sit up and reflect on the DNA
we and creating for our progeny.
While we can convince ourselves
that some of these are growth pangs and pains that any young nation has to go through,
I am sadden to see lack of leaders & people who can hold our country to her
true north. Its one a minor mercy granted to our nation (by sheer law of
averages I guess) that we have somehow managed to elect a decent prime minister
every term. It however pains me to see that our moral quotient has been
hollowed over the past 65years to such an extent that we now no longer care
when girls are raped and our own citizens lathi-charged for protesting on the
same. We have, not a single leader in public life whom people wish to emulate.
We’ve run out of Heroes!
While we certainly need to accept
the trails and shortcomings during our nations march to progress and modernization,
we must not forget the foundations & guiding principals our nations’ father
wanted to lay for the country. We need to rekindle our dormant consciousness;
we need to lift out our heads from the sand of our daily existence; we need to
break away from the lethargy and warmth of our shallow cocoons. We need to do
all of this; else we might not be left with the nation as we know it. We need Bapu now! We need someone strong enough and humble enough to shake our great
nation out of its slumber. We need this so that our nation is not known as a
nation of weaklings and morally corrupt but a country whose people have a
strong moral fiber and enlighten vision for themselves.
India was once called the golden
bird. This was not only because of the abundance of wealth found in our temples
and palaces; but also the culture and knowledge they fostered. We need to be
reassured that the father of our nation did not die in vain. We need to
collectively exert to make this golden bird fly again.
