India celebrates 64th Republic Day
26th January 1950 marks one of the most significant day in Indian history- a day to remember when the Indian Parliament adopted the Constitution of Indian Union.
As a nation we have achieved some great feats in the fields of science, space, sports etc. The republic day parade itself is a display of the cultural and military might that India is today.
Agni V - Putting India in the top 6 nations with ICBM capabilities
Delta formation of Sukhoi fighters jets
Bike formation
President Pranab Mukherjee endeavored valiantly, in his address to the nation on Friday, to get us to look at the glass – of India’s evolution as a nation in the 60-plus years since it secured independence and became a republic – as half full.
India, he noted, had changed more in the last six decades than in six previous centuries. Our economic growth has more than tripled; literacy rate has increased four-fold and more; from being food importers, we’ve now become foodgrain exporters… yada yada yada.
Only the churlish would deny the validity of these markers of marginal economic and social advancement. And since statistics can be invoked to back up just about any hypothesis, Mukherjee’s proposition that “we have come a long way from 1947″ can be established by the invocation of convenient data points.
One of the entrance border at Eastern Border of India
However we must not allow the statements like above from our president and the might at display to delude our thinking. A question we all need to ask ourselves is are 'We the people' to whom the constitution is supposed to serve are happy with where we as a nation today are?
What makes us Happy about today?
The challenges India faces today are far greater a threat to be simply ignored. The country stands at a juncture where anything and everything is about protecting the chosen few people who control the government machinery and deploy it to protect themselves sometimes against the very own people they are meant to serve. Recent Delhi gang rape incident and the protests it caused has touched the citizens of the nation to their hart and have a left a scar on the collective consciousness. The brutal treatment of the otherwise largely peaceful protests that the govt machinery dealt with is both disheartening and scary.
To me the following are the challenges that are required to be tackled immediately -
- Girls all over India are continued to be raped, even as President was giving his lecture
- Everyday this "biased" media shoves pictures and videos of Rahul Gandhi in our faces showing 0.1% moments when he was raising his hands and voice, while dreaming of clubs in Italy.
- Hindus, who were the original people in these lands, are being sidelined, while government is bending head-over-heels for minorities in the name of secularism. Secularism means no one is above law, not that some are above law.
- Poor become more poor and Rich people are getting richer
- Mukharjee was made the president when we had better, more honest and more neutral candidates.
- Last president made loads of money while in presidency, and nothing was done for the nation.
- Hundereds of Billions of dollars are stashed away in Swiss banks.
- We continue to reel under reservations. Talent is being squandered for votes.
- Brain drain is at its peak, hundreds of professionals leave India EVERYDAY, because their skill is neither appreciated nor put to use in India
Yet, in the face of all this weariness and despair, we hold on to the slender thread of hope that tomorrow will be better than today. Precisely where this hope comes from is hard to establish: for all the stirring rhetoric about India as a work-in-progress, the slide down the slippery slope of misgovernance shows no signs of being checked. Perhaps it’s just a defence mechanism that we have built for ourselves to evade dealing with the reality of India.
