Freedom and Nation

Like everyone, I love freedom. I have not met anyone yet who doesn't cherish the utter joy of being free.
The idea of freedom, as I see, differs from person to person, generation to generation. A woman in Delhi may define her freedom by how she dresses or her career and ambition. On the other hand, a woman in a burqa may find a different kind of freedom within the shrouded confines- freedom from dirty gazes, freedom to smile absurdly which no one will be able to see, freedom which comes from anonymity, freedom to maybe even look at that handsome guy standing over there without fear of being detected.

Can there ever be absolute freedom? India freed itself from the Britishers only to find itself in the clutches of dynastic rules of Sonia Gandhi, Rahul Gandhi and Rahul Mahajan. And what was that special atrocity which the British committed which the Mughals and likes of Shiraj Ud-Daula had not committed? The peasants were in utter misery even then as they were under the British. Yet, there was no equivalent of a Gandhi back then. Infact, we worship the Mughals and have important landmarks named after them. Hell! Mughal period is also called 'Golden' in History books.
So, what was the freedom we earned after shaking off the Bristish? Can it ever, in a perverse way, be said, that the British freed us from the atrocities of the weak and backward Mughals? That they brought railways and Universities and transformed Calcutta and Mumbai from tiny villages to bustling metropolis?

The hippies cried out "I want to break Free". Did they really want to break free or did they wanted to be left alone to do what they please? There is an unmistakable difference between the two.

Can we ever be free of the voices screaming in our heads? For, we have to acknowledge the existence of something to oppose it. So if the youth movement of the 60s and 70s said that we believe in no nations, no boundaries, they were indirectly bowing in front of the very rules they wanted to shatter.

Which brings me to the quirky idea of nations and states and boundaries. Isn't a person from Kolkata similar to a person hailing from Dhaka? yet, a Bengali soldier may be more ready to fight for a tiny portion of Kashmir against Pakistan and may not really worry about the person hailing from Dhaka. To the Bengali soldier, Kashmir is as alien, geographically and culturally as Pakistan is. Here the concept of nation comes in. Kashmir and Bengal are parts of the sovereign India.

For a man who lives in a remote corner of the globe, his village is the world. For a global leader, the entire world is not enough for his vision.

Like the decimal number system, the concept of nation is for our convenience. And it is not the only available concept for dividing people. When I say people, I do not mean citizens. I mean you and your neighbour. So if, one day, a national border is drawn such that, it cuts cleanly between yours and your neighbours house, does it result in you both becoming non-neighbours just because the territory of your country ends with you and the next country starts from your neighbours house?

Freedom and nation are products of mans experiments and his defeat. When man is defeated by his own nature to live peacefully with another human being, boundaries are drawn. Boundaries, some which can be seen on maps, some which cannot be seen, like those shadow lines.