Independence Day

One of the first romantic novels I read was called 'Eleanor and Park'. Set in a world far far away from mine, I travelled to US for the first time, then in a ship of romance to a land that reeked of the smell of freedom. On a rainy evening in Guwahati, when perhaps the sleepy town had finally woken up for a cup of Laal Saa I found uncanny freedom in the characters of "Call me by your name" as they found their own in a small village in Italy. Yet another time, ages back when I was only very little, I found an Euphoric sense of freedom in Mia's life from "Princess Diaries" living a high school life that Indian girls can only dream of.

Recently, almost exactly a month back I read another book and found another kind of freedom. "Shadow Lines" by Amitav Ghosh has shifted my core in many ways, but when it concerns the idea of freedom, yes I felt free as I read it. I travelled in a unique galaxy of freedom where the freedom was very 'Indian' yet not bound to India.

As I travel through the realm of so many freedoms, I wonder what freedom is mine. What freedom really sets me free and what freedom is a mere utopian vision. And you see, I can't say all freedoms set me free. Of course, some freedoms are important to ensure things like Rights and Laws. But there are some freedoms found in songs, literature, art, films and souls- the kind of freedom that has no bound limitations and that can be accessed with the energy tapped from the veins of our bodies.

And I wonder, perhaps, if that freedom is immortal.

No, the freedom of soul dies when one lets it and lives when one lives with it. Freedom of soul is not bound by nationality, race, caste, gender or religion yet is found in all fragmentations that society has been divided into . Freedom of soul is the crux, I think, behind a nation's freedom and it is this freedom that Gandhi, Nehru, Ambedkar, Kamaladevi and many of our leaders had sought. If I think, think really well, then Indians achieved freedom in their souls much before they achieved it on paper. Then perhaps, India's entire struggle of Independence was lived through the freedom, the sheer force of freedom that bred in the heart of a captive Indian. As men and women marched the streets for a country that may not be theirs in their lifetime, they had acquired freedom from fear and inferiority. We were free, perhaps always have been.

Freedom is not a national concept. It is borderless. Yet freedom is not alienated from a nation either. We Indians constantly weave our own kind of freedom, which a teenager from another part of the world will travel to through books, songs, or stories. We nourish freedom through sportspersons who come from the poorest of backgrounds and make the most extra-ordinary achievements, through writers who fight years-old institutions of language and pave path for their own, through actors who would have been farmers but decided to break the shackles of their class and caste, scientists who work through the smallest of budgets yet send machines beyond the boundaries of earth- they explicitly exercise a freedom, that is intrinsic to humans and that is born, in their cases, in India.

While 75 years of Independence marks an important milestone, India has been free through many parts of its invasion and been invaded in many parts of its freedom. We push our ways again and again as we try to reignite the lamp of freedom, a freedom that is not owned but lived.

Freedom by Rabindranath Tagore