Jai Hind begins with the place we call home: Celebrating the India around us

Every 15th August, I get very emotional, even teary-eyed. The thought of everyone else enjoying a holiday on Independence Day - sometimes, even a long weekend - while I have a usual workday, cuts me up finer than chopped onions slipped into a twice-born's diet as statutorily warned in the Manusmriti. But not this year, quiches!

Falling on a Saturday, my regular day off, with the first half of a Sunday to recover, yesterday was a rare 15th August when I was just like everyone else - patriotically-aligned to raise a few tumblers to thank now-dead Britons for getting the Mysore pak out of India in 1947 after some 200 years of asset-stripping and super PR ('Bringing you civilisation never felt so Kipling'). It may not be the most genuine form of showing love for one's nitpicking and country, but the very fact that Independence Day is a special chhutti has to be branding genius that no uncolonised country can ever fathom.

For my parents and his generation though - my father was 7 and my mother 5 on August 15, 1947 - Independence Day 1.0 was a palpable thing. On that day 79 years ago, and for some more years that followed, they realised that something special had happened. Because the grown-ups were celebrating like India had won the World Cup.


Celebration was spontaneous, so that even the horrors of Partition couldn't completely dampen spirits. Not even for grown-ups who could actually comprehend the horrors if they chose to.

But over the decades, 15th August became another Karva Chauth, with the nation replacing the husband, and every Indian a dutiful wife wishing the country's welfare in terms of GDP, greater global influence, loud meaningful singing in praise of Bharat Bhagya Vidhata - now also joined by Mataram - and hoisting the tricolour, instead of being hoisted by some petard, which sounds like a politer way of saying, 'Har Ghar Tiranga'.

But move away from the 'Fun Day of Soviet Activities' and what 15th August has also turned into, while keeping up with the Jhunjhuwalas next door, is a short getaway, a drive to the hills, a special pizza meal, a dhamaka sale, a day at the cinema... essentially, what happy consumers would want a special day to be for planting a paper flag on the car dashboard.

Because if yesterday wasn't really about either celebrating the departure of a bunch of guests who had abused and overstayed their welcome some 80 years ago, or about 'feeling free' more than on any other day, what was it about? Paying homage to our 'freedom fighters,' noble as it must be, seems more like school homework than Yaay! celebration that one would think Independence Day to be.

Perhaps, the trick is to scale things down. Instead of thinking only 'Hail country!' in all its lovely abstraction, maybe celebrating our immediate neighbourhood would be more actively tangible? Not just peddle pranaam to statues and frames portraits - including of the one who adorns all our banknotes - but revel in the things immediately around us: the gorgeous phuchka-golgappa at the mouth of the road; the planetary monsoon skyline from the window; those puppies cavorting under cars who suddenly turn into heaps of sleep; top of trees visible from the balcony that become a green Sridevi sari in the breeze; the kids practising aikido moves in the neighbourhood park; even the insides of our homes that we fashion in our own images...

This is the tangible 'country' we inhabit, the 'desh' we belong to, which in turn belongs to us, for which we harbour a deep taken-for-granted fondness. Not as grandiose as patriotism - a word hammered into shape from 'pater', in the sense of 'father-land' - but an unbidden, unprompted pull for where we stay, where we are, where we feel freely, without any need for stage directions.

And for this, you don't need an Independence Day, holiday or no holiday. All you have to do is look out of the window, take a walk around the block, drive to the local khana-peena, sit back in your living room... It's always Jai Hind somewhere.