I once happened to participate in a session of group discussion on this
topic at an orators club on the eve of Independence Day. This club is an
organization formed by a group of volunteers who are keenly interested in
public speaking and they made it a practice to conduct sessions on public
speaking every Saturday evening. Non-members are also welcome to attend and
take part in these sessions. My personal interest in public speaking drove me
to that session and it’s only after this session that I realized the need to
act with a broad sense of thought. It is then on that, I started relating every
experience to a pragmatic basis.
Now that I experienced such change in my course of thinking,
I finally gathered views worth sharing. Patriotism is an intense human emotion.
Human emotions are not devoid of logic, social, and clinical psychologies are such
domains that evolved over times to explain this fact in an organized fashion.
As a common civilian, I need to have a justification to feel patriotic. If
someone questions me on what if every soldier on the nation’s boarder demands
such justification then the only answer I can come up with is to boldly agree
that I do not have the strong heart of a solider. I unabashedly agree that I’m
a common civilian and I’m in no comparison to such people who sacrificed their
comfort and dedicated their lives to the nation’s defense.
By a generic essence, if emotions are not justified they
could act on obscuring our intuition for instance when I participated in a
college level debate on the issue “Can India host Olympics?” most people went
on to speak in favour of the topic. This is because they all regarded it as a
question of national esteem they simply resorted to support their views by
answering the question “Why can’t we?” in their own terms. But I wanted to
emphasize my views by choosing to answer the “Why shouldn’t we?” question in
this context. If we step out of the dogma to take pride in being patriotic and
look into the reality, then it turns evident that hosting Olympics involves
significant finance and as of now it is advisable to divert such finance into more
productive routes so as to attain self-sustenance in many aspects for instance
that could be used to improve medical facilities in a remote village, to
support some small scale industries, to support primary education in rural
areas etc.., may be down the line we could also think of hosting Olympics but
when the right time pops out and this depends on the progress we register in
terms of resolving or at least regulating the other problems that are a
priority. By the way keeping off from hosting Olympics doesn’t mean that we
should stop encouraging our players and these are two different aspects not to
be mixed.
So during my schooling I was taught that India has a rich and
varied heritage, India is the only sub-continent in the world and also that
India stands by the philosophy of unity in diversity and that India has its
roots of civilization dating back to the B.C periods. However the reality that
I encountered later on, taught me more.
To be precise, though our unity in diversity concept seems so
idealistic to a non-Indian the fact that we all as Indians know of is that it
is barely capable of disturbing some extremists to act anti-social and this
diversity is a significant factor that holds back our progress. I’m referring
here to the scope this diversity implies to an extremist mindset and it is
practically impossible to have no extremist opinions in a diversified society.
What if India is the only sub-continent in the world are we making out the right
advantage of that I mean since we host such varied climatic conditions for
instance encouraging research of climatology could gain us international fame
besides fetching economically so that is then an aspect to take pride in. Even
though our civilization dates back to the early B.C periods, there is no efficient
dissipation of that knowledge and wisdom to the current generation. If India
has a rich heritage, then it needs to be efficiently used to attract tourist
attention and then that shall surely be an aspect to take pride in.
Eventually I’d like to make it
clear that patriotism as a human emotion needs to be looked upon with a
pragmatic basis. So patriotism to me is not to react towards upholding the
esteem of the nation but rather to regard the true picture and learn what is
indeed good for our nation and there by deduce ways of reforming the worst part
of any scenario associated with the national interests. This new perspective is
definitely better fetching than the dogma of looking and feeling patriotic by
some ideologies.
