We tend ask the little kids this question: “What does freedom mean to you?”
And the answers we receive are all the more adorable or hilarious. My own elder sister, when asked as a kid what freedom meant to her had answered, “to eat chocolates whenever I want without scoldings.”
These are small dreams that children engage in, even find happiness in. As we grow up, however, the dreams leave, replaced by cynicism and the general exhaustion that dogs all adults. TV shows and movies and books, mostly American, present a reality literally and metaphorically oceans away from our own lives. While it may not be the reality, each of us was enamoured with the notion of living the High School Musical life, or even Riverdale or Never Have I Ever. They don’t have uniforms. They get to choose their own subjects since a young age. They can drive and visit friends whenever and are allowed to express opinions and date freely. It is everything Indian kids never had and always wanted.
Combine this with our cynicism and frustration, and it morphs into something sharper, angrier. Suddenly, Bollywood music makes you cringe, the movies are baseless and no longer entertaining. English-language music dominates your playlists. Teen girls like me see the covers of the latest fantasy romance novel and wish to have blonde hair and blue eyes and flinch away from the mirror on seeing the differences between their puberty and the puberty shown in Riverdale. Those girls have perfect, manageable hair and smooth skin and the freedom we crave in our lives. Doesn’t matter that it’s not real. Traditional clothes and crowded streets, hawkers and flea markets, regional language and darker hair—suddenly, it’s all repulsive. The country has a myriad of problems, all unsolved, all stoking the resentment brewing inside. Why can’t we have the suburbs of America? Why can’t we speak one language? Why can’t we be like them?
We can’t be like them, is the simple answer.
Why?
Well, for starters, America has had two hundred years to grow and develop as a country and a world power.
India celebrates its seventy-fifth anniversary today; it’s not even been a hundred years since we achieved freedom from colonialism.
The other answer is that its still there—the colonialism. It’s there in the way young kids grow up hating their skin colour and body hair, wishing to lighten everything up. It’s there in the way India is the land of poverty and spirituality in the eyes of Hollywood, in the way historical English TV shows always brush over their unsavoury acts in the ‘colonies’. It’s there in the way adults heckle kids about their lives, their appearance, their weight, their aspirations. It’s in the way social media apps let white people get away with (and even appreciate) appropriating the same cultural traditions that we had started hating. It’s in the way a number of people consider speaking Hindi or your regional language a mark of being uneducated. It’s in the way we, as kids, still do not have the freedom to choose our dream for a number of reasons. It’s in the way we are expected to be perfect students, and forget the small joys in favour of endless hours of studying. The perfect minority.
I do not advocate for some ancient, utopian, pre-colonial society. Two hundred years of slavery did not simply vanish in the air because the flags were switched. This Independence Day, however, I do ask everyone to find the strength to not push our inheritance into binaries. We’re always going to be different. And maybe sometimes our differences deserve to be celebrated instead of derided. Because if we choose the latter option, don’t we all become the same as the British?