Old men start it, young men fight and everyone dies in between…. One dialogue…. just one dialogue caught my fancy from the movie Rambo. Yeah Stalone has grown old but what the heck he is still Stalone.
I still remember the craze for his postcards, posters and pictures. There were still more of such icons that most boys worshiped. I don't know if using the word worship as a replacement of adulation can cause hurt but a whole bunch of vandals making vicious agenda out of beautiful poetry certainly hurts. I really don't subscribe to Gandhi's idea of fighting with non violence and as he says it will hurt too like all fighting hurts.
In recent Indian political history and the now continuing aftermath everyone seems to be chasing a song called Vande Mataram. I still don't know who composed music and the tune for it but this is in my native Bengali .We have grown up on a healthy diet of native literature unlike any other found in the face of this planet. Native chauvinism which smacks of ethnic populism but always immersed in love and never boastful. The very idea of creating a National song and a National anthem is a western produce and we quite appreciate the idea for we can flaunt our identity at important public functions and most of my native brethren simply swell their hearts with pride for getting our number chosen as fit for representing the national ethos.
Well the first instinctive reaction when we hear that some people call upon to ban it is simply blood boiling. I will be honest in saying that it is even more so when some people who have absolutely no clue of anything other than theology sporting some kind of a bra on their head show the audacity to forbid common people from singing this song. On the hind sight I also think that people who propagate the idea of making it compulsory as a matter of state policy have not the slightest of idea about the heart of the author who penned this song and the whole emotion this song brings up.
Most Indians know Vande Mataram as just a song but I doubt anyone quite gets the grip of it for most Indians see it as some kind of prayer rendition to mother India… Oh gosh another prayer. There it goes …. go through the regulation. In reality this phenomenon reflects the most hideously unpatriotic, illiterate and ignorant side of my countrymen.
Bankim Chandra Chattopadhya was one of the first of the Indian origin Magistrates to join the British civil admin system in India. His stories and novels are all inspired by Hindu mythology and he somehow had a love for borrowing into dark, blood letting pagan superstitions. His stories and the much talked about national song of India itself has a very dark quality. Most Indians have only heard the first paragraph of Vande Mataram. The remaining stanzas are full of feverish invocation referring to the Nation as mother with endless hands to caress and calling upon her sons to raise the battle cry and lift the sword from the sheath to create a terribly sounding revengeful roar. He also says that we are so much in love with you that we will install your form in temple after temple in the land of endless temples.
No one actually grasps the innocence of those days for what Bankim is trying to say is only human emotion. It is only an emotional being that hero worships. In the modern ways of this world view, buying a Michael Jackson poster or a Bruce Lee and doting your walls is this same very emotion that Bankim speaks of.
Now the question is- in this land of the young should we decry it??
