At the stroke of the midnight hour..

when the world sleeps, India will awake to life and freedom

Last night I was watching BBC Entertainment, and there was this pretty interesting programme on as part of an Independence Day Special called The Last Days of The Raj. Now since I’m actually studying the Freedom Struggle, it caught my interest and it definitely helped me understand things better as the details of the Freedm Struggle can be a bit overwhelming to study. I’m hoping to watch as many of these documentary type things as possible before I write my exam next month !

Anyway, I decided to read up on the speech Nehru made when India was granted independence, and it struck me that much of what he said in that speech still applies to this country today. One thing that stood out for me is this :

The future beckons to us. Whither do we go and what shall be our endeavour? To bring freedom and opportunity to the common man, to the peasants and workers of India; to fight and end poverty and ignorance and disease; to build up a prosperous, democratic and progressive nation, and to create social, economic and political institutions which will ensure justice and fullness of life to every man and woman.

I can’t decide if the common man today has all the freedom and oppurtunity that he is entitled to. The burden of poverty, ignorance and disease still remains heavy on the nation, although I firmly believe that we are a progressive nation.

The whole text of the speech can be found here

One thought on “At the stroke of the midnight hour..

  1. hi,

    Well a maverick effort to canvas a rather broad topic, but without looking at the content with jaundiced eyes, would say the writing is a nice entree’ but leaves me obscenely hungry for a main course…..
    India certainly has come a long way, long enough when Pt. Nehru stood on the pedestal and took a country of an odd billion down the path of socialism. Today we muse at our acheivements in the IT sector, Space tech and the capability to produce missiles, hot curry, doctors, engineers and demi gods (Lest we forget the temples for Sri devi, Rajnikant and the likes). Some dedication there, by our own indian genre of hics and yobs.

    Nevertheless, the point is, Today in 2007 we dont stand and look back and say well we have come a long way. Sure we did, but do we have the the audacity and the will to say…lets talk about me, what i could acheive and fuel the individualism in me. Though some may flip the thought of having to think in this fashion due to an opinionted and an idealistic bent of mind, i would imagine, to further state that its selfish to share an outlook like that.

    But consider this a meandering of an idle guy or a rather useful contribution…..unless we think about ourselves, in the (me) context, it is futile to think whatwould happen to this country of an odd billion, and its poverty or resign to the fact that we need to protec the underpriveleged and the lass through measures of reservations and oh yeah…..populist vote banks…….so gone are the days of Nehru…..say bonjour to the era of dubya(bush) and Sania.

    Or lets wait it out for the losers….unless u wanna tread a path of selfish acheivement which is not a bad thing after all…..given it took 60 odd years and we still couldnt come up with 11 dudes to kick a ball in the right diretion, hehe…..ending this on a light note!!!, albeit abruptly

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