So another Independence Day dropped by, and left, somewhat disappointed at the muted hospitality of our home this year round. I was not really in the mood for adda-bajji (a very Bengali term for gourmet gossip) around nationalism, patriotism, jingoism and the shades of difference.
Granted, I think of the nation as an imagined community, courtesy Benedict Anderson, but the alleys and hyperboles of this landscape tend to reach two dead ends: one, of too much imagination (in that too many people imagine the nation in too many different ways; i.e. when do the joys of pluralism get overwhelmed by the dangers of confusion?) and the other, of too little imagination (in that too few people seem to have the power to change the nature of the nation for the greater good, and those who do, hardly seem to think about it at all).
Early in the morning on August 15th, I watched the car in front of us at the traffic lights create the perfect image: the gentleman in front bought two plastic flags from the kid at the junction and stuck it into his rear-view mirror. The gentleman at the rear threw his half-eaten apple out of the window on to a perfectly clean (till then), tarred road. And believe me, tarred roads are tough to find in B’lore these days. A moment of truth. But not quite a moment of praxis, huh?
And that’s why I found this strange piece of (almost) unrelated trivia rather fascinating. Macbeth – the laird of Scotland – was killed by Malcolm on August 15, 1057. So what links the deed with the day nearly 1000 years later? Nothing really, except that most of what we think we know about Macbeth, is imagined through the words of an extraordinary poet, a playwright, but never quite a historian.
So it doesn’t feel as though freedom will mean much to us till we get off our asses and stop pontificating about what it means. For all that we have reason to be suspicious of the powers that be, we give them the added power to imagine the nation(s) that we live in, since we do little imagining ourselves. So wherever we are, whatever it is we do, it’s worth struggling a little bit every day against the status quo, towards substantive freedom. Not just for an individual, but for a collective, a consciousness, a conscience, an imagined nation. It might mean something as simple – and as significant – as knowing where your apple cores should go (perhaps in your backyard, rather than on our roads?), and making sure they get there. My greatest fear is to be found rotting away in my armchair, attached to a kindly epitaph: full of sound and fury… signifying nothing.