India Is Great

Mera Bharat Mahan....
Celebrating 61 years of Independence.
(Back of a truck on the way to Shimla)

As Jug Suriya wrote in his recent Jugular Vein column

"India is vast space; space to accommodate the clamor of giant cities, teeming with the seething energy of millions and the silence of empty solitudes.

India is space; space to include the pilgrim and the politician, the poet and the revolutionary, the street urchin and the merchant prince, Ahimsa and nuclear might, 3,000 years and the 21st century.

India is the express highway thundering with traffic and the slip road beside it with the sign 'For camels, elephants and bullock carts'.
India is mega dams and factories, call centres and shopping malls, and the voices raised in protest against all these and more.

India is a colour TV, garlanded with marigolds and a picture of Lakshmi on top, playing MTV while grandmother counts the beads of her mala and grandchildren dream of US green cards.

India is the roar and tumult of democracy and the forgotten face of a forgotten neta on an election poster stuck on the crumbling mud wall of a village deserted by all but the ghost of hunger.

India is the faceless anonymity of cities where neighbors don't know the names of neighbours and it is the 'Ram, Ram' of timeless greeting exchanged by strangers who pass each other on a lonely path.

India is the smell of incense and ancient stone, of parched earth when the first drops of rain fall, of the dust and sweat of rattletrap buses, of the sweet, milky tea served in an earthen bowl by a 'chai , chaiwala !' on the whistle-stop railway stations of night.

India is the crowded bazaar where two dozen languages and half a dozen faiths negotiate the day-to-day transactions of buying and selling, and haggling and cheating, and quarreling, and, above all, always above all, living together.

India is much more than a million mutinies now; it is a billion-plus narratives of itself, waiting to be told. Not just once upon a time, but once upon a future"...


India is all that and more to learn and experience