You get a gift from your dad.. you keep it, treasure it and after some time you feel like you can do whatever you want to with it.. because it’s yours anyway..

You earn your first salary.. you feel happier, you cherish it more.. you spend a day thinking what you will do with every rupee.. and you are disgruntled with the very thought of it going to a waste.. You might even keep that paycheck with you forever as a memory of your toil..

Our independence was gifted to us. No offence to the people who won it for us. But lets face it: our freedom has been taken for granted. We are not even aware of being an Indian except when we are watching a cricket match! We have no respect for our country, let alone our countrymen. Some people don’t even know the names of five people who won us our freedom. Our freedom is undervalued. Our freedom has been forgotten.

And then I look at other countries who were also under rule for a long time. I look at France and America. They had such big revolutions and so many martyrs who gave up their lives. They did not patiently irritate their rulers into freeing them.. they rightfully snatched their freedom from them..

Something tells me it wouldn’t have been so if we had “earned” it in another way.. And yes, there were other ways..

1776! That is when America won its independence. 1789! French Revolution. They did it nearly 200 years before we got our freedom. Our leaders made great sacrifices too.

But because their was not much bloodshed; because not many of us lost our forefathers or have ancestral stories to make us believe that freedom was not an easy thing to attain; we have forgotten to value the legacy and honour our country. To do that, we probably needed leaders to make the people throw the British out.

Like I said, we needed to earn our freedom. Not get it as a throw-away gift. And other measures were on the lines of Netaji Subhas Chandra Bose, Shaheed Bhagat Singh, Chandrashekhar Azad and Lokmanya Tilak to name a few..

A violent freedom struggle was seen as the fitting reply to the treatment we had been receiving from the British. And it had worked on them before too. Our appeasement policy gave us freedom for the namesake. With that we got two woodpeckers of neighbours. Not saying that the leaders did not do good. No!

They did great.. they did really great.. but we weren’t looking for freedom from the British only.. we wanted a complete freedom in the longer run.. we wanted a country that could sustain itself and grow.. not a country stretching and pulling in every direction..

While we patently waited to shake the moral grounds of our rulers, they cunningly chopped and hacked us in every possible way, leaving wounds that would never heal. We got rid of the British and we placed new brown rulers in there place.. so the power that was meant to change hands from the British to Indians, changed hands from British to a selected group of favoured Indians.. is that freedom?

And it wasn’t leaders all alone. It isn’t today. And it wasn’t then. I guess people chose to follow non violent means more because it allowed them to remain in their comfort zone.. It was more of a passive approach which even the British tolerated happily.. On the other hand take the tactics of extremists like Tilak, Azad and Bhagat Singh or even the organised armed approach of Netaji.. it had Britishers panting day and night!

What if our independence was not patiently earned but hard fought? What if we had shed more blood and made it into a crimson victory? Would it have got us free quicker? Would we then have valued our nation more? Would we then have been really free today?