Rang De Basanti

Today, I saw the movie Rang de Basanti, a story about how 5 happy-go-lucky Indian youth get transformed into fiery revolutionaries and finally give up their live for a cause.

It left a deep emotional scar on me. It brings back the question that I keep asking me often.

What does freedom mean for a nation, where a girl gets raped every 4 seconds, a child is forced in slavery in work and taken away from education, where a person gets traped in bonded labor and a person is discriminated by untouchability and poverty? What does prosperity mean for those people who doesnt even have access to basic necessities food, clothing & shelter and where thousands die of hunger and malnutrition and totally avoidable diseases everyday? What does development mean for a nation where hundreds of millions earn less than $1/day and 400 million people can't even read or write any language? What does equality mean for those people, who cant draw water from the well, due to their lowly birth? What does opportunities mean for those people who dont even send their kids for primary education?

How do we attain Azadi for the nation of India?

Whom are we going to get our freedom from? Is it going to be from the foreign powers that imperialize(d) us? Is it goin to be from those worst criminals who rule us under the guise of politicians and make laws for us? Is it goin to be from the totally corrupt beurocrats whose misplanning kills our nation everyday? Is it goin to be from those law enforcement persons who commit as much crimes as those, from whom they are supposed to protect us? Is it goin to be from the govt. officials who badly enforce all of the governmental measures? Is it goin to be from the caste and religious leaders who seek to whip up the emotions of the people and gain sadistic pleasure? Is it goin to be from those poor-quality teacher, killer doctors who do false operations, deadly engineers who design those collapsing bridges .....

We have thousands of people from which we need to get freedom from, and this we use as an excuse for our inaction. We hide behind the walls of coverdice, by blaming everyone around us. We hide behind our silence that veils our impotence. If there is something that we need to get freedom from, It is WE whose coverdice and impotence sustains the despots. It is our silence that grows the clutches of violence. IT is our inaction that puts our nation in peril. If we watch a crime happen before us, and dont stand up to it, we are as much part of the crime. In this way, every one of us are CRIMINALS.

We need to change ourselves. We need to wash our sins of inactivity and corruption. We need to feel guilty of every minute we waste, as we lose a chance to save someone from violence. We need to feel guilty of every resource we waste, as that could have been used to save hunger and death. When there are people who commit suicide for Rs.10000 ($200) of their agricultural loans, unable to raise their family due to drought and famine, we need to know the preciousness of what we have. It is our success and prosperity that we are goin to work on and channelize them for the growth of everyone of us, not by the stupidity of communism, but by market prosperity and entrepreneurship skills.

We need IAS officers, professors, engineers, scientists, lawyers and social thinkers who can set our economy and society on a roll. We'll solve the problems of society by our collective will and potential. If every educated youth, taught an illiterate to read and write a basic script in a year, within 5 years, we can wipe out the whole problem of ILLITERACY. If each one of us could just share our success to a rural kid and motivate him/her and provide them basic information, we could wipe out the whole problem rural in-development. And We need the revolutionaries whose thoughts can set the society on fire and whose ideas can inspire whole fields of thought.

Everything is in the realm of us, but still we find it comfortable to be stupid, loser, cowards who grumbles against everybody else. It is WE who are going to change....

INQUILAB ZINDABAD