Not all books we read can leave us questioning, wondering and instill in us a feeling of living through the times and in situations that we’ve personally not experienced.
‘Freedom At Midnight’
This is not a book review per se but thoughts that engulfed my mind as I walked through the pages of this book. Read on!
It is a generally human tendency to build our perception with the author’s notions and ideas as the base. Everything we know is only the interpretation of our senses. The contents of this book are no different. Through the eyes of Dominique Lapierre and Larry Collins, the book portrays certain officials as leaders and role models whom we’ve never imagined to be. It looks like back then, the greater part of the struggle was to propagandize the feeling of oneness in every Indian. The description on the diversity in India once again articulates the grandeur of this place.
Think about it! For some of us, worship means to chant prayers in unison while for some it’s a personal conversation guided only the sound of temple bells and glow of the fire. For few, God has no form while for some, Nature with all its elements are God. The language of a person in the south is not understood by one from the North or for that matter even by those who are little less than 100 miles away. What is considered clean by one is ritually clean for another. Contrasting beliefs and practices across the length and breadth of the country. Think again- would you have imagined a place like this to remain as one piece till date and its people to be called citizens of one nation above anything else?
The struggle for Freedom meant fight our own land back but also to keep alive its diversity. We have come a long way indeed. So long that we now question without reason, argue illogically and determined to lose identity. Maybe the roots are deeper and the problem what we think is the problem is actually not the one.
When I read this book, chapter one to two and on, the incidents that were part of our fight for Independence described in this book sounded familiar but the experience was new. We grow up learning about Quit India, the partition, communal riot, the perseverance it took to raise the tricolor that represents not a region or religion but the then 400 million and now 1.2 billion. But our textbooks failed to tell us that its result is what we are now and questioning this is questioning our existence.
Let’s try telling the next generation that certain things are beyond doubts and choices, teach them when to argue and when not to and pick battles consciously so that next time when someone says “Love your parents” or “Respect your elders”, they will not say “This cannot be enforced on us or made a mandate”.
“Where the clear stream of reason has not lost its way
Into the dreary desert sand of dead habit
Into that Heaven of Freedom…”
-Tagore
