There has to be an ETA with common sense and logic. We cannot keep delaying this flight as a nation. We cannot discuss the rights and wrongs of sitting down when our national anthem is being played in a public place. It is not up for debate. You don’t want to agree with the fact that playing it at cinema halls trivialises it, fine, go for it and discuss it all you want. But till it does change and it plays, you stand.
And if the introduction to it is a dedication to those who died on 26 November,2008 in the Mumbai terrorist attack then you stand up that much straighter. No one gives a whistle in the wind what your religion is, what your caste or how rich or poor you are but when that anthem starts to play you stand and salute it and those for whom it is being played.
There is nothing intellectual about it, nothing legal, no great drawing room elitist drivel to defend those who belittle it.
Think of it. The current controversy cannot pinpoint the city with any accuracy except to say it happened. This was a family if the video is genuine not some college kids on a high caper or taking on some undergrad dare.
They elected not to stand. It was a deliberate decision and in a world where the French just a few days ago sang La Marseillaise in a soccer stadium even as terrorists pockmarked their city, we are so blasé and self indulgent, we are sitting here listening to people giving their version of why it was okay for this family not to stand up.
Reason; you don’t have to. What are you talking about? You have to, okay, period.
In most countries you side against the opposite sports team you get reamed. This is national honour. What is way beyond tolerance, my friends, is that in this country that family went home for dinner.
What is with us that we are so deep into self destruct mode? Damn, the most distilled emotion comes when your anthem is played, no matter where, and if it is played for you what greater honour can your nation bestow upon you?
It is on this canvas that I cannot understand people like Shashi Tharoor who have been gifted with silver spoons in life deliberately fomenting mischief. I don’t know who his Bangladeshi friend is from whose shoulder he fired this toxic salvo but to say that ‘a cow is safer in India than a Muslim’ is perhaps the most provocative, mean-spirited and a horrendous thing to say and one can only begin to think that both communities have to wake up to the possibility that they are being played like a fiddle so that suspicion and angst and hostility are given a hi-octane push. You can watch the video here:
A week in India and you come away with the feeling that there is an agenda, one designed to cause as much rift as swiftly as possible. The inability of the people to recognise intellectual terrorism as a weapon allows for such invasions of the mind. It is more dangerous and more effective than a suicide bomber. That individual can kill only a finite few. The intellectual terrorist time bombs your mind and holds the detonator.
He gives ‘blow your mind’ a completely new meaning. Intellectual tourism is tomorrow’s militant.
For a brief and not so shining moment let’s see what difference there is between a family that decided to defy basic courtesy and grace and dishonour the anthem and not standing up.
Compare that state of mind to a man who nearly became the Secretary General of the United Nations and when someone like that intends to be slippery clever and cause dissension with whatever motive he makes that family in the cinema hall come of like small potatoes.
With every such incident or statement the belief that someone Machiavellian is orchestrating the biggest cerebral brainwash since Independence gets stronger by the hour.
We won’t notice it like we don’t notice tsunamis till they are upon us. But it is happening and we are all falling into the trap, some slower than others, some willingly, others trampled in the stampede.
Get that deadline into place. This flight is overdue and we need to land it and our country safely on the ribbon.
You worry about checking bags at the airport. Worry instead about the worms in their minds.
Because words will beat weapons any day…stone, paper, scissor….