What is freedom? What does it mean to you?

Today is India’s 72^nd Independence Day. Many years ago, or rather, exactly 22 years ago, I was working on a newspaper story to commemorate India’s 50^th Independence Day. It contained interviews of people as they remembered that very day, 50 years before, in 1947. The mood, the festivities, their emotions, the pulse of the nation; what they did, how they felt, how they celebrated.

These were mostly folks in their late 60s, 70s and older, who had been youngsters on the eve of India’s independence. They talked about the excitement and optimism they felt and the belief they held that India would be unstoppable, once she was free.

They spoke of the freedom they had sought, for so long, as a nation, a movement that had mobilized them and the generation before them and the sweet success they felt and even perhaps a sense of disbelief, as one lady mentioned, that day in August 1947.

That story unfortunately never got written, for something more important came up, but every Independence Day, I am reminded of the interviews and the stories from August 1947, scribbled in my notebook.

There is small chance that I may ever recover that notebook, but the energy and the sentiment of that time remains with me, through the accounts I heard. One narrated of how they rode the Mumbai local trains all night long. All the local trains were full. Everybody was on the streets and celebrating. They didn’t quite know what to do and spent the night simply wandering about the city in groups and it sounded like everybody was doing the same. Some remembered the first PM, Jawaharlal Nehru’s famous speech, “tryst with destiny”.  

I talked to folks who as college students had been part of the freedom movement and even some subterfuge activities. My own aunt told me how she once crushed a piece of paper with some vital information and stuffed it in her mouth and was a subterfuge carrier. Others told me of how their entire college experience was on the backdrop of the freedom movement. I could feel the zeal and vitality in their voices. A strong sense of purpose and justice they sought and the freedom they yearned to move forward.

My father who was only a young lad, remembers how his mother, who seems to have been an activist, mobilized the women in the neighborhood and made a certain sweet, bundi ladoo, to be distributed to children in the city school. The government had given them a certain amount of money, which would be insufficient had they purchased sweets from a store. As a result, his childhood home was thronged with women rolling out laddoos, and the floors were completely covered with delicious golden balls. There were laddoos everywhere and it is his fond and evidently sweet memory. 

His childhood seems filled with memories that speak to the pulse of the moment and the movement. Of his sisters and mother who wore sarees they spun from the charkha, a loom made popular by Mahatma Gandhi, in the wake of the Quit India movement and swadeshi (self-reliance) movement, where the push was to not use products imported from the British. As a result, people spun and wore their own cloth. He remembers rows of charkha in their home and women spinning and also the opportunity he once had to gift Gandhiji, a shawl they had spun on the charkha.

My personal favorite is when he went on a satyagraha, just like Gandhiji would – sat on a mat, declared strike, refusing to eat or drink – an in-house civil disobedience movement, in protest when his mother refused to take in a stray cat or dog that he wanted.

Stories like these speak to the mood of the nation, how entwined even young children were with the movement. How cohesive the whole nation seemed to be. There seemed no room for apathy, everybody had one goal, one unified goal – that of freedom.

In our daily life, living in “free” nations, I wonder what freedom now means to us. Does it mean different things for different people? Every independence day, when I think of my unwritten story, the one thing that strikes me is the passion these seniors seemed to have for freedom, the sparkle in their eyes, the energy with which they spoke about freedom.

The collaboration, the unity, the common goal, the passion it invoked, for justice and human rights; the passion they spoke with, of generations coming together for a common goal, a common good, that of equality and justice and the deep sense of purpose it seemed to have ignited in them.

Sure there were factions and there were the cynics, and the traitors, but the cohesive movement had a strength and a life of its own. 

In our daily life, living in “free” nations, even if we don’t have an obvious goal to move towards, I wonder if apathy has leaked in. In being more focused on ourselves, if we may have lost a larger perspective on our world. For there remain, many other freedoms worth fighting even if we are “free”.

And there are those personal freedoms worth striving for. I know for sure, there are things I would love to free myself from, biases, and beliefs that do not good, the need to conform to certain things for no good reason, fears that I live with for no apparent reason.

In our daily life, living in “free” nations, there are still shackles we live in and create for ourselves – at the personal and larger level. May we learn to mobilize the courage and vitality that lies in the sentiments of the scribbles in my old notebook somewhere – to free ourselves from those too.