THE Rising...

I finally got down to watching The Rising and I loved every bit of it...what struck me most about the movie was how it rightly pictured an India at its lowest ebb, at the very nadir of its 5000 years of history, of a people who had degraded into a spineless, fractitious, humiliated race to turnaround the history of the world by declaring the arrival of modern-day civilization with a 90 year awe-inspiring, non-violent freedom struggle. August 15 heralded the birth of the world's largest democracy and the proud Englishman, Churchill's prophetic words of the sun finally setting on the English Empire became true.

Mangal Pandey, may have been an accidental hero as historians claim but when he lit the spark of rebellion he had also unknowingly checked the centuries-old decay of India's civilizational ethos. The very instruments of modernization the East India Company created to expand their trade and wealth helped catapult their fall. They united the entire Indian subcontinent from Afghanistan in the west to Burma in the East, Kashmir in the north to Kanyakumari in the south under their sphere of influence, networked the whole country with roads and railways bringing into contact people of different lands, started schools and colleges to educate men and women to work as their babus, and as greats like the Mahatma, Swami Vivekanada, Ramunjan, C.V.Raman, Tagore and Netaji kept springing up they realized it was only a matter of time before the Indian Nation would rise.

The India of today...where else in the world would you see such diametric opposites...people who speak more than 1/2 of the world's known languages, people who look and dress differently, people who believe in different faiths, people who differentiate between each other on the basis of castes, a people ideologically divided from the day of the country's birth...yet we dont see civil wars based on these contradictions i mentioned above which have torn apart nations like Ireland, Sudan, Pakistan, Yugoslavia or bloody dictatorships like in Nigeria, China or Afghanistan...even a supreme power like the Soviet Union fell apart not being able to manage their internal contradictions. I belive the way we won our freedom has the answer to this paradox....if we had taken to the gun instead of satyagraha, the Indian psyche would have altered to an aggressive, hotblooded race which would have turned violent for every issue caused by the co-existence of such diversity and though many within and without, ridicule us for being a "soft" state, the Indian people havent suffered at-all for belatedly exploding the atom bomb or the countless withdrawals from Pakistani territory after each Indo-Pak war(America sweating it out to ward off Iraqis on their own soil wud give us enuf ideas...wht it wud have cost us to hold on to those Paki lands we gave up!)...many violent movements have cropped up in our country but none have succeeded or will succeed...from the early Tamil nation movement, to Punjab, Assam, North-East to the himalayan fortress god gave us...Kashmir! Many of these movements began in non-violence but without the support of the people they claim to represent, they failed and the extremist elements within them took to the gun...and u know where that story ends or will end!

Kerala may accuse Tamil Nadu of stealing water, TN charges Karnataka with blocking the Cauvery, Punjab and Haryana hotly claims Chandigarh to be their own(the Govt wisely named it a Union Territory!), the demand for Khalistan has reared its head again, Gujarat remains divided on communal lines and Bihar on caste, the naxals fight for their version of utopia as they strive for the naxal corridor...superficially it all looks a bloody mess! But watching The Rising...i felt there was this chord lying deep within each of us that makes us an Indian which ties us up so inextricably into a nation which will rise up again...and again when affairs go out of hand...too many lives have been taken and too much blood has been spilled on our soil to build this country...the memory of those martyrs and good movies like these that keep coming out(if not for our history textbooks...anytime i'd choose one like that over a movie) should serve to remind us of a nation built of sweat, blood, toil and satyagraha and how each and every one of us is a vital cog in taking our proud nation to greater heights.

Jai Hind!