What really is Independence day??

This is probably the first time in my life that I was working on the Independence day and loved it. Well, I am not trying to sound too NRI-ish here because 1) I am not 2) I really loved it, for a change.

Its amazing how our brain remember things and words only because there is a story or picture associated with them. For example When someone says Bat, and Indian would definitely think of a wooden Club used to play cricket and not the flying fox. Whenever I read or hear 15th August, It reminds me of a Holiday and a couple of Nationalistic sounding songs. I am sure like most of my friends in India, I would have been more excited about the whole 15th August thing this time because it was a long weekend. Seriously thats the only thing we care about these days, long weekends. Go for movies, dinners, plan out a trip to the hills, drink and when you come back load the pics onto facebook. Album title 'Independence day weekend' and yeah make sure that our profile pic is replaced by the Indian Flag till atleast 17th August. Thats Independence Day.

I remember the last independence day and also a couple of them before the last. The most patriotic thing I did last year was buy a small Rs 5 Indian Flag at the Traffic light in Delhi to put up on my Car's dash. I didn't put it there eventually but, hey I atleast bought it. And also an Independence Day may be an year before because I felt terrible at not having an Indian Flag like everyone else to put on my office desk, though I had diligently put one up on my Orkut profile.
In Sydney this time, I came to work yesterday. Spent the whole day working and in meeting and went home after a good productive day. It was kind of liberating because I didn't have to prove that I care about Independence day by buying flags.

I think we are the worst generation that India has seen since Independence. We are a generation of Armchair thinkers and Twitter Revolutionaries. We are the ones who put the most flags and start the most number of public conversations, and do nothing. I think we have wrongly started to assume that words written on Twitter or expressed on a blog like I am doing are impacting a change and would eventually make India a better place. It saddened me to the core reading the headlines on Indian dailies this morning. Someone who tried to do something and not just pretend like we do, had been arrested and disallowed. Numerous updates on this have been posted to twitter since morning and if you are following the right people, the story has already been converted into jokes. And pay attention please, its only 16th August today and most of the DP flags are still there.

Just because we posted it here on blogger, tweeted on twitter, shared on Google+ and updated on Facebook, many of us believe we have done our part.
India probably needs a huge 'Cleaning up the mess' drive. I don't know how but I know who would do it. Its eerie to even try and work up a similarity with events that happened in Egypt and rest of the middle east couple of months ago.

I have nothing more to add here, would go back to my happy existence and pretend to ignore whats happening on the streets of Delhi today. Let me read some technical articles and not think of the rot thats crippling my country.

I am sure this was a good blogpost that I wrote, I am sure most of you who read this would be nodding your heads. And that exactly is the problem, we have started mixing the real world with the virtual. We have convinced ourselves that since we wrote/read the patriotic article on a blog and listened to some patriotic songs on Youtube, thats exactly the amount of patriotism we require these days.
I am not against being social on the net. In fact I am the most ardent fan of the things I just described here as bad. My only request is that if you find a Patriotic article on twitter, Facebook or Google+, go ahead and share, But don't stop there.