Let us do something different this midnight hour

Long years ago, we made a tryst with destiny and now the time comes when we shall redeem our pledge, not wholly or in full measure, but very substantially.

Fifty eight years ago, as Pandit Jawaharlal Nehru spoke these golden words, and declared India independent at the stroke of the midnight hour, he would not have even imagined that the very national borders that were sacred to him and his contemporaries will start to lose meaning only half a century later. But that is precisely what is happening and precisely what should be happening.

As I stood in the administrative block grounds staring proudly at the Tricolor and listening to Rohit speak of the wars we still need to fight before becoming truly independent, I realized that perhaps there is another basic thing that we are all ignoring in the blinding light of passion and nationalism that a National Festival like the Independence Day fills us with. Perhaps we choose to conveniently ignore on such occasions that it is no longer about your country and my country, it is no longer about your progress or our progress...it is our world, our progress now.

Perhaps it is not realistic to talk about the principles of Vasudhaev Kutumbakam right now, with the super power in US rearing its ugly head every now and then to dominate and crush those constrained by geographies that are not as powerful. Perhaps it does not make sense to talk about boundarylessness with wars being fought on the slightest of pretexts and tensions simmering between borders, including our own. Perhaps it is not wise to imagine a world where humans, as a specie, will rise together and pursue their collective dreams, fight their common demons.

However, this is what the reality is going to be like, pretty soon. With the enemies that we are fighting against making their real faces visible, the realization is slowly creeping in that Darwin's theory of survival of the fittest is not as simple as fighting against your fellow beings if you need to produce your offspring and ensure its and your survival. We have to fight much more...illiteracy, poverty, ignorance, sickness, diseases, terrorism, immorality, crime, and much more if we are to survive. There is little time on our hands with the threats of an energy-less, resource-constrained, hard-winged religious, communal, and regional, nuclear anarchy looming right ahead.

The only way we can fight all this, as most of us have already come to accept, and others will do in the years to come if Darwin's evolution theory is to hold any water, is to stop giving so much importance to national borders and work towards fighting these evils plaguing our future collectively. We need to build upon our dreams and not live in the past by fighting over strips of land, drops of oceans, and breathfuls of air.

We do appreciate what the freedom fighters did for us at that stroke of midnight hour when the whole world slept and India awoke to light and freedom. We do realize the contribution they made by getting us the right to be free but all the same, the time has come to not just redeem but redefine and then redeem the pledge that they made...to let the whole world awake to light and freedom together... let none sleep this midnight, let all get up, arise, fight and be counted.