Back when I was young and foolish, I used to wonder how we Indians, given our numbers and our legendary perseverance, could ever be ruled by a handful of Britishers.
I thought sheer population and stubbornness would be our shield. That so many millions, unwilling to vanish, would never bow to so few.
I was wrong. I have seen now that it is precisely this, our numbers and our fixation on mere survival, that makes us so easy to rule. We endure anything. We adapt to anything. We take pride in “adjusting” as if that were a virtue. We bend when told, then bend lower, then crawl until crawling feels normal.
In that quiet surrender, power finds its perfect conditions. The coloniser of yesterday and the authoritarian of today are both sustained not by their own strength, but by our willingness to trade dignity for the comfort of existence. We tell ourselves we are biding our time, when in truth, we have forgotten how to stand. We have exchanged, in every way, a walk-on part in a war… for the lead role in a cage.
Survival alone is not freedom. Without the will to resist, our endurance is nothing more than a leash that we hold in our own hands. Indeed, I believe that we must not just build our will to resist, but even aspire to be sacrificed for the tide to actually turn. For that is what was needed to drive out the imperialists from our lands. And that is what we’ll need again, to restore this nation to the glory it is capable of. We need, indeed, to find सरफरोशी की तमन्ना in our hearts once again if we are to leave a better society and nation for our children.
