“At the stroke of the midnight hour, when the world sleeps, India will awake to life and freedom. A moment comes, which comes but rarely in history, when we step out from the old to the new, when an age ends, and when the soul of a nation, long suppressed, finds utterance… We end today a period of ill fortune, and India discovers herself again.”
These are the impressive words of the speech titled, “Tryst with Destiny” given by Pandit Jawaharlal Nehru on August 15, 1947. The real struggle for independence of India had begun almost 90 years before in 1857, when a group of sepoys mutinied against the East India Company.
Nevertheless it needed another 90 years for India to become an Independent State.
But, today, one must take a moment to ask oneself – is India really free and independent?
Other countries are still invading India. They build factories which produce goods they can’t produce in their own country for the same money, even if it means ignoring the safety regulations. Child labour is still common, and not a lot of eyebrows are raised when a ten year old boy serves us a cup of tea.
Hundreds and thousands of people have been, and are being, affected by terrorism, still we say India is free and independent?
Corruption rules the country, still we say India is free and independent?
A sizeable population does not know where their next meal is going to come from, still we say India is free and independent?
At such times, we should look back at times when India was really free and independent, even if that was a long, long ago. The Wikipedia has this to say about that time:
The Indus Valley Civilization, which spread and flourished in the northwestern part of the Indian subcontinent from c. 3300 to 1300 BCE, was the first major civilization in India. A sophisticated and technologically advanced urban culture developed in the Mature Harappan period, from 2600 to 1900 BCE. This so called Bronze Age was followed by the Iron Age