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- Mark Twain's Notebook
I was talking about my qualms of enrolling in NCC for free marks and then cutting its drills. I felt I was the epitome of un-patriotism.
I now see that I needn't have worried overly. For, Samuel Johnson had said:
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[Patriotism] ...is a word which always commemorates a robbery. There isn't a
foot of land in the world which doesn't represent the ousting and re-ousting
of a long line of successive "owners" who each in turn, as "patriots"
with proud swelling hearts defended it against the next gang of "robbers"
who came to steal it and did -- and became swelling-hearted patriots in their
turn.
- Mark Twain's Notebook
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Ishani is now all of 4 and is as curious as any girl-kid of that age.
Her Lily School has an anthem of its own. I don't recall my school at Muthukur or my university at Vizagh or my IIT at KGP having their own anthems.
Anyway, Lily School celebrated our Republic Day a couple of weeks ago. And Ishani returned home with a tiny Indian Tricolor pinned to her uniform. And in the evening she sat down on the floor with her paint box and brought to me her drawing book and asked me to draw the outline of our Tricolor so she could paint it in all its glory. And it was no big deal for me.
While busy painting, she started crooning Jana Gana Mana and stopped when she came to Mana. And looked up at me and asked:
"Granpa! What is meant by Mana?"
And I was almost about to blurt out:
"Mana means Our"
which it indeed is in our mother tongue Telugu which Ishani understands well enough. I checked myself in time and ignored her question and buried my head in my Deccan Chronicle. With good reason. Had I answered her query painfully, she would have dug deeper with more questions like:
"What is Jana? What is Gana?"
and so on...after all I was a teacher at IIT and know how to hop, skip, and jump my student's uncomfortable questions.
And I started wondering what a predicament it is for me to be in, unable to explain the meaning of the lead words of my national anthem simply to my little girl. I don't think any British granpa would be in the same position with their 'God Save the King (or Queen)'.
I felt happy that I am no worse than a Nagaland granpa. In which case I would have to look up the Wiki for the 'official' English translation of our anthem. Yes, there IS one, done by Tagore himself, and it had to be mugged up by my classmates at my university who were preparing for their IAS entrance exams. Just look up the Wiki.
There is this curious entry there:
http://gpsastry.blogspot.in/2014/02/national-anathemas-1.html
Ishani is now all of 4 and is as curious as any girl-kid of that age.
Her Lily School has an anthem of its own. I don't recall my school at Muthukur or my university at Vizagh or my IIT at KGP having their own anthems.
Anyway, Lily School celebrated our Republic Day a couple of weeks ago. And Ishani returned home with a tiny Indian Tricolor pinned to her uniform. And in the evening she sat down on the floor with her paint box and brought to me her drawing book and asked me to draw the outline of our Tricolor so she could paint it in all its glory. And it was no big deal for me.
While busy painting, she started crooning Jana Gana Mana and stopped when she came to Mana. And looked up at me and asked:
"Granpa! What is meant by Mana?"
And I was almost about to blurt out:
"Mana means Our"
which it indeed is in our mother tongue Telugu which Ishani understands well enough. I checked myself in time and ignored her question and buried my head in my Deccan Chronicle. With good reason. Had I answered her query painfully, she would have dug deeper with more questions like:
"What is Jana? What is Gana?"
and so on...after all I was a teacher at IIT and know how to hop, skip, and jump my student's uncomfortable questions.
And I started wondering what a predicament it is for me to be in, unable to explain the meaning of the lead words of my national anthem simply to my little girl. I don't think any British granpa would be in the same position with their 'God Save the King (or Queen)'.
I felt happy that I am no worse than a Nagaland granpa. In which case I would have to look up the Wiki for the 'official' English translation of our anthem. Yes, there IS one, done by Tagore himself, and it had to be mugged up by my classmates at my university who were preparing for their IAS entrance exams. Just look up the Wiki.
There is this curious entry there:
"...The following translation (edited in 1950 to replace Sindh with Sindhu
as Sindh after partition was allocated to Pakistan), attributed to
Tagore, is provided by the Government of India's national portal:[9] "
So, our Babus did after all change the original Tagore word "Sindh" to "Sindhu" when Tagore's song was proclaimed our national anthem long after he died. This should, somewhat unsatisfactorily, address the comment of a reader to an earlier blog post:
- som said...
- How can we modify someone's creation, sir ? At best, we can think of some different poem for National Anthem, if 'Jana Gana' is creating a feelings of left out in some region.
I was talking about my qualms of enrolling in NCC for free marks and then cutting its drills. I felt I was the epitome of un-patriotism.
I now see that I needn't have worried overly. For, Samuel Johnson had said:
"Patriotism is the last refuge of scoundrels"
Fortunately there aren't any scoundrels in My India any longer...only fence-sitters and file-sitters.
For, there was trouble on our western borders a few months back when some of our soldiers there were kidnapped and beheaded by our eternal enemies promising us a 1000-year-1000-cut war. When the decapitated bodies were brought back to their home state for burial with full military honors, there were no ministers of the 'concerned' state attending the solemn ceremony. On the other hand, an honest minister gave this statement:
"People join Army and police only to die, says Bihar minister as he justifies his absence from martyrs' funeral"
http://indiatoday.intoday.in/story/people-join-army-and-police-only-to-die-says-bihar-minister-bhim-singh/1/298596.html
And of course retracted his statement duly. This is not even fence-sitting...it is fence-falling.
DC had recently commented that India would have been better off if some of our ministers had as much love for our soldiers as for their buffaloes.
As for file-sitters (aka Babus) there is this charming story:
Ataljee was always into external affairs when he was an MP. And had made several trips to the Office of the External Affairs Minister in the South Block on the Raisina Hill in his capacity as a member of its august committees. And was always charmed by the portrait hanging there of our first External Affairs Minister, Jawaharlal Nehru, in his jawahar coat with its red rose.
Long after Nehru passed away, his daughter imposed an unfortunate emergency on the nation and imprisoned many opposition leaders including Ataljee. And then called for an election, misled by her eternal chamchas. And lost it. And then Ataljee became the External Affairs Minister in the short-lived Janata Government. And was escorted ceremonially and obsequiously by the concerned Foreign Secretary.
And Ataljee was surprised to find his favorite fine portrait of Nehru simply missing from the wall. And inquired about it. And came to know that the Babu there had ordered it to be removed lest it hurt the feelings of his new boss who was thrown into prison by Nehru's fond daughter. And was amazed at the sycophancy of our Babudom. And ordered the portrait to be restored to its glorious place.
And narrated to his ignorant Babu how fond Nehrujee was of Ataljee. Apparently when the young Atal made his maiden speech in Lok Sabha in 1957, Nehru was so impressed that he wrote a fan mail to Ataljee and wished him well:
"In 1957, Vajpayee was elected to the Lok Sabha, the lower house of India's Parliament, from Balrampur. There, his oratorial skills so impressed Prime Minister Jawaharlal Nehru that he predicted that Vajpayee would someday become India's Prime Minister.[4] "
...Wiki
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