Salutations on a good 60 spent and wishes for excellent centuries ahead!

I am one of those corny Bollywood kind Indian patriots...the kinds who would not have any trouble kissing (a cleanish) part of Indian earth getting back home, the kinds that would carry the flag and run through enemy territory and collapse on Indian soil (give life for a useless cause in the name of India)...and so on.
It is not cool to shout that out on rooftops and much cooler to highlight all the wrongs and 'might have beens' in our 'system'.

So I want to reinforce some amazing achievements...achievements that are truly world class and recognized as such by the world (except our over critical/cynical selves!). The first election commissioner Sukumar Sen. An accomplished mathematician, he was responsible for bringing our millions, literate and otherwise to the polls. What did India in the '50s do? Gave universal adult franchise (or suffrage) in one fell swoop. France was the oldest nation to give male suffrage (they called it universal, guess the 50% who hold up the sky were doing that job when the males were posturing in politics!) in 1792....precipitated by a bloody revolution and a few guillotined monarchs. Their women voted in 1944. India as a nation came into being in 1947 and brought a pretty progressive constitution into being in 1950.

So we decide, despite crumbling infrastructure, poor to no connectivity, a tiny literacy rate....like I said, the limitations are and were galore...to ensure that every adult voted in our first election. Coming back to our hero, Sukumar Sen brought in voting stations, assigned personnel (I am sure had to get some intensive training done), gave us all a simple and usable system that covered people who wanted to band together and become a party (elections symbols that were recognizable to all), achieved a 45% turnout.the list goes on and on. And all this in one election.

8 million ballot boxes were made. Indelible ink was developed by Indian scientists and manufactured in bulk (how inadequate that word is to describe 3,90,000 phials of ink!). To ensure that people did not make a mistake in casting their vote, each party had its own ballot box. In each polling booth!

Sukumar Sen faced problems like women not wanting to give their names, preferring to be called Ramu ki Ma and the such. The first election saw 2.8 million women's names being struck off the lists for this reason. This is a more acceptable reason to me for outdated voter lists. The last election saw my name being struck off the list for 'political' reasons! By the way, how the heck do they know how you vote? The BJP worker in the poll booth knew I didn't vote in their favor!

It was in essence a leap of faith by a whole bunch of people and managed and run by Indians who were sincere, if almost barefoot in terms of infrastructure. The EC as an institution is a visible and toothed organization. I mean, to get those asses who masquerade as politicians to be wary of you, you have to be quite the rockstar!

And this is only one hero. I learned of Kamala Devi Chattopadhyay, the child bride turned feminist, an aristocrat who truly worked for the people disadvantaged by centuries of abuse that her class perpetuated, the person who established Cottage Industries, the National School of Drama, Sangeet Natak Academy, the Crafts Council of India. She was the first Indian women to be arrested in the freedom movement (she took packets of contraband salt to sell at the Bombay Stock Exchange and got one whole year in prison!). She founded Faridabad at the time of partition as a township where refugees from the North West Frontier could rehabilitate themselves in peace and dignity.

This is only half of what she did in her life....I can feel myself running out of steam just describing what she did, much less take on and do one task that she did in her lifetime. I always thought I would have wanted to be alive during the freedom movement and do some damage to some institutions that keep us enslaved. This Republic Day (and my almost 40 years of life experience) has taught me that it is infinitely more difficult to build, nurture and cherish than critique and tear down. We still need the critique, just enough to ensure that our institutions are robust.

I love my India! Fade out into the sunset, still running around that sole, still standing tree......