Breaking News!

After 70 years of glorious independence, all our problems have been solved! We are ushering in a new great future that may rival best of the best in the world!

No, not yet.

What went wrong? Why are we not able to say 'Aye' for the above declaration?

What was the need for independence in the first place?

A land mass with many disparate groups of people joined together to fight against an oppressive empire disguised as a trading entity that stayed far too long than the welcome window we extended to them.

This empire united us with a singular hatred that we expressed this way: 'We don't need any outsider to fix our problem. We will do it ourselves. So, Quit India'.

It was a long and arduous struggle with no success for close to two centuries. Nothing seemed to work in our favour till the day the actual seed of our independence was sown by a frail man walking around, half dressed, with a walking stick to assist him.

Walk he did, 390 kilometers precisely. That shook the empire unlike anything done by anybody till then. It succumbed and the tree blossomed seventeen years later; 1947 happened. 

He must have used some high tech cutting edge Weapons of Mass Destruction so mighty that the Empire was scared to submission right?   

He used S A L T.

When the Empire slapped a tax on salt that our people harvested from Seas (we were doing it for hundreds of years) and jailed those who didn't pay up, his conscience told him that that this was very wrong. He did not start writing to higher ups / did not call people to arm or harm the Empire / did not organize any big rally etc...

He simply started walking towards the nearest beach, unarmed (if you count his walking stick as a weapon then it is your problem!).

78 people who were with him in his ashram at that time joined him out of respect. They walked for 24 days. He reached the beach one fine morning and scooped up a fistful of salt, no taxes paid!

From this fistful of salt grew the seed of independence into a beautiful tree.

An empire that ruled us for 250 years was thrown out by an individual within his life time by a simple act that he did in just three weeks! A miracle!

What did he do so special that rooted them out and gave us the nation that we promised to fix by ourselves without any external help?

He became the change that he intended, Period! 

We tasted a victory that was so mighty that generations of his fellow countrymen and women were entitled to feel and stay truly invincible. Right?

Now, we are 1400000000 strong (1.4 billion that is) and how is our 70 year old 'free' nation?

Women are not safe, Children are not safe, Elders are not cared for, the able bodied ones won't stay that way for long due to screwed up life choices and greed fuelled business world that encircle them 24*7, Education is screwed up, Air is screwed up, Land is screwed up, Water bodies are screwed up, Morality is oozing down the drains/rivers/oceans which are clogged by our own garbage...

Are these challenges bigger than the Empire that shackled us for two and a half centuries?

What went wrong? Went wrong so terribly?

Our unity left us the moment the Empire left our shores. Then we forgot the biggest and bold statement we put up and believed in and bet our lives for 250 years; 'we shall fix our problems by ourselves'. 

We also forgot the man and his simple, geography altering, history altering quip; 'be the change'!

Buddha said 'this shall pass' as a way to help people stay grounded come what may in their life - triumph and disaster to be treated alike (Rudyard Kipling famously elaborated this idea in his seminal poem "IF").

We misunderstood Buddha too! We thought if we close our heart and mind long enough, anything shall pass and we shall blink back to a rosy reality.

That has resulted in a mess of a nation as nobody wanted to be the Agent of Change that the old man wanted us to be.

We celebrate Independence day every year with lot of fanfare and go back to our crippling reality, cribbing and blaming everybody around us for not fixing our problems.

If and only if each one of us become a change agent and use Buddha's saying to ride over the apathy, we shall have our true independence where we all shall live in harmony with dignity of thought, action and reflection.

Let us take a pledge today and stick to it; 'If I feel anything happening around me is simply not right, I shall do my best to set it right, regardless of the odds stacked against and the personalities behind it'. 

We don't have to celebrate just one day as independence day if we are able to stick to our promise. Then every day shall be an 'independent' day in a nation whose shackles were broken by our collective will backed by individual action. This shall be truly the 'breaking' moment in the long sad history of our 'independent' nation that shall set us 'F R E E'.

I do believe in the triumph of (individual) human spirit. 

I AM a change agent. What about you?