Jai Hind

This has been posted by my brother-in-law Haider Ali Amir who may soon become an op-ed page regular like his sister

The reason we give credit to Gandhi for our independence is because he was a man of principles, a man of simple, solid and great principles. He was not the only one with such principles. There were many others with the same principles, most of them gave into Gandhi calling him ‘bapu’; the others were hanged until dead. I am not saying Gandhi was not a good man, he was, but was he not a man who submitted to perhaps the biggest blunder leaders of our country could have made, yes I am talking about the partition. He is the same Gandhi who fought for independence but also was a part of the education system that made him the barrister he was, people change so do the times and so do the consequences. Freedom is either earned or fought for. We earned our freedom by the Gandhi way of principles way and we still keep fighting for all the other (correct or incorrect) reasons. In most common of these reasons for fighting is religion, caste, money, la, la, la, la.(This statement is of no social or political importance).

My second point here to make is that thy great father of the nation did not realize that after the cult following of a man there are the aftereffects. There might have been a time in Gandhi’s head where he might have gotten immune to the “Mahatma Gandhi zindabad” shouts and accepted saying, “What the fuck I am a mahatma, let the people shout, till the time they are shouting my name, it cannot be a sign for violence.” In fact he got so immune to hearing his name loudly cheered for that the next shouting voices he heard were the killings of Hindu - Muslim riots during our greatly earned independence. Getting back to the point about the aftereffects of great people our Gandhi was no Ernesto ‘Che’ Guevara that; other than a handful who know what ‘Che’ has achieved, only remember him while rolling a joint or when they feel like rebellions try to change the world. Our ‘bapu’ left his aftereffects on the great democratic system of the country, in short the politics. Our government takes time to do everything they initiate just like the way when our independence could have come in the early thirties we get in the late forties. But nevertheless we could not have taken the World War II on by our own selves.

Gandhi was an ingeniously influenced character. He was so influenced by the queen’s rule on India that he ingeniously went after them for freedom. You see we are bunch of confused people, ‘we’ here refers not only to us Indians but to the 7 billion living on this planet. It is okay to say that there are two sides to coin for every debatable topic in this world, but in today’s world the coin is hexagonal. That is why I say confused, I am not trying to be khushwant Singh here and preach you on being not confused because I am a confused guy myself. It is okay to have Kurt cobain say “it is better to burnout than to fade away” one side of the world and on the other side having Roger Federer thinking that he can still be number one. But to have a genre in music called as stoner rock is the hexagonal coin I am talking about. To have to choose between BJP and Congress is one but to have to go to vote on four different levels is for forty same sounding different beliefs, kind of parties is shit. That is why I like Gandhi, and that is why I call him ingeniously influenced. He never cursed the British for giving us the railways but he always had an issue with class of traveling in the train. He always had a problem with violence but he did not utter a word when the British gave us the capability to create the second largest army in the world.

61 years since independence of which I have lived an odd 21 we still have some unanswered questions. But we live with it and we are doing pretty well(fuck that we are in debt to half the world). Gandhi is dead and so is Nehru’s tryst with destiny and an offer to redeem it. All you can now redeem is your credit card points.