It is the 75th Independence Day of India today and I am an Indian. The one thing that I have always found striking about India is the phrase “Unity in Diversity,” which I came across first in a geography textbook sometime in the 4th standard and this is a small writeup inspired from that phrase.
I do not wish to make this political or religious. I just want to talk a bit about that term, factoring in my experience of a recent trip to the capital of India, Delhi; in April this year. I also read an excellent essay by Pico Iyer, in which he stated that the difference between a tourist and a traveller is that a traveller will visit a restaurant in Bali and order some food and realise that the food being eaten is not so different from food the traveller has had before, whereas a tourist will draw a comparison between the food being eaten and the food back at home and will in that comparison complain that nothing in that restaurant in Bali is like what the tourist had to eat at home.
I have been fed by the farmers of this country. This country has given me roads to walk on, it has taught me its languages and made me literate and I owe this country the paper that it gave me to write my exams on, so that one day I could stand on my own feet. This country has created doctors who have cured my illnesses, it has created film personalities who have entertained me with their craft, tailors who have made the clothes I wear and so much more.
This brings me to the things I experienced while on the train to Delhi. The way a stranger offered his bottle of water to me because he saw I was perspiring, the way a little boy was pulling the dupatta of his mother’s salwar kameez because he was hungry. The fact that an old woman of a different faith wanted to buy her grandson a samosa because he was hungry and since I was sitting by the window, she passed me some money and she asked me to get the samosa from the vendor and give it to her.
The clothes I wore were expensive. I was wearing a branded pair of jeans and a t-shirt. And yet, the person sitting right in front of me, talking to me about how he had a job interview coming up was dressed in a jeans and t-shirt too. He did not shy away from speaking to me because I was more fashionable, infact he complimented me on my Hindi.
Travelling in that train, surrounded by these people from all walks of life, from different backgrounds and with different stories to tell, I realised something. At the end of the day, we all bleed red (although cricket fanatics will be quick to say that its blue), we all drink water, we all eat food. That is our unity. And yet, in that unity, we have people from different faiths and exposed to different languages, foods and spices and who have seen different parts of this country and are from different parts of this country, which they were either travelling to or travelling from. This is our diversity. But at the end of the day, we are all Indian and human.
And I am promptly reminded of Rabindranath Thakur’s poem , “Where the Mind is Without Fear”, specifically the line:
“Into that heaven of freedom, my Father
Let my country awake”
Welcome to India and Happy Independence Day
Special thanks to Surbhi Jain who helped me to edit this at literally a moment's notice. The time stamp on her last message reads 21:47!
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