However, just when everything had become a habit, I found myself one day standing in the middle of many─pizza-boys, college beauty queens, middle-aged housewives with vermillion lined foreheads, peasants and shopkeepers in white kurta-payjamas and dhotis, fathers, mothers, their student children and over-earning IT professionals, all marching together in one voice and spirit in support of a man. Now, whereas I have personal─and perhaps misplaced─reasons for not following someone in flesh and blood, I have absolutely no qualms in following the idea that The Man is proposing and making millions across the length and breadth of this country march as one. I wondered, where have I come? This is not the country that mine or my father’s generation has known. Ours has been a divided land where ambitions are disguised as virtues. Yes, I know today, I have come to some other place where ‘unity’ is a real thing; where One Man has shown us a country that we all read in books.
It reminds me of another incident I read in a book, this time involving Pt. Nehru: In the dawn of independence, Pt. Nehru found a Hindu and Muslim fighting each other─both, more than willing to kill each other─only a little away from the huge migrant camp that our recently divided state was finding difficult to handle. Pt. Nehru ran between them, stopped them and screamed on top of his lungs, ‘Is this what we got Independence for?’ Pt. Nehru, take my word: If your spirit hovers around today, your disappointments would be washed away for today we all see the free India that many of your days died for.
I might not be a hero, I am certainly not Mr. Hazare, but today, without a shadow of doubt, I, like countless others, am Hindustan.
If this is home, then home never felt so good.
