Every time I hear the national anthem my urge to stand up decreases not because I am ashamed of India but because I am ashamed of what we have become.
We Indians are a proud race of people. We feel violated when we lose to our noisy neighbors on the cricket field but not when we lose to them in everything from the global hunger index to the unemployment rate. We are quick to point out the higher number of reported rape cases in the west but no one talks about the 99% of the rape cases which go unreported in India and from the 1% which are reported less than 30% result in convictions. We like to boast that Kashmir is ours but we don’t even care about the people living over there and when they try to speak up, we take away their internet. To be honest who cares as long as we have that chunk of land. We call ourselves accepting and open-minded yet we kill our fellow Indians in the name of religion. We call ourselves the land of equality and unity but that equality doesn’t apply to you if you are Dalit. We are so focused on preserving our culture that we promote Chinese firecrackers as tradition. We call ourselves the home of modern science but we have ended up becoming the land of pseudo-science by promoting illogical and unscientific cures such as Cow dung for cancer and Coronil for Covid. We consider our rivers holy yet we can’t manage to keep them clean. The saddest part is we don’t even acknowledge the worsening air quality and climate change. Whenever an Indian criticizes the government or what we have become in a foreign land we say, “ghar ki baat ghar mein rakho” no wonder we have such high rates of domestic violence. By 2020 we were supposed to become a superpower and yes we did become the superpower of injustice.
We Indians are truly a proud race of people but we might be too proud to accept our own mistakes and shortcomings. I should stop right now because I believe I am too young to be lynched or be declared an anti-national terrorist.
