Happy Independence Day

India's celebrating its 63rd Independence Day today. I'm in an auto with a friend and we're cruising down Moolchand. I look around and i realize, we Indians really have a thing for everything English/American, don't we?

I look at the number of cars around and man does Delhi have plenty of 'em. I see a grey Innova, a red Swift, a green Beat, a black Safari, a silver Honda City, a maroon Wagon R, a black Esteem, a red Accent...

I look at billboards advertising townships around the NCR, plenty of 'em too. Fortune Arcade. Golf City. Jaypee Greens. Wisteria Lane. Really? Wisteria Lane?

Yeah. We're all proud Indians. Aren't we, y'll?

We laugh at people who can’t speak English. Look at them condescendingly. Knowing English is the ticket to a good life. Parents work day in day out to educate their kids in English medium schools. Schools that don't teach them the difference between 'then' and 'than', 'stationery' and 'stationary', 'bought' and 'brought', 'effect' and 'affect'.

Kids score a ninety percent in English and fail in their own language paper. More and more students are opting for French and Spanish instead of Sanskrit and Hindi in schools. Everyone wants to go to the US for higher education. It does not matter if you get admission in an obscure university located in the middle of nowhere in Southern part of America where it’s blazing.

Yeah. We're proud Indians, aren't we?

We prefer eating in a McDonalds or Subway and getting a fat ass over a place serving Indian khana any day.

Yeah. We're proud Indians, aren't we? 

Ok. Maybe it’s just the AC. But what I'm tryna say is, why the hell is coolness equated with all things English? Wasn't two hundred years enough?

HAPPY INDEPENDENCE DAY!!

Aama

Its seven thirty in the morning and I’m coming back after seeing my brother off at the train station. He’s going home to Darjeeling. I haven’t been home for two whole years now. The last time I went I had more than 102 degrees temperature, my lips were chapped as dry as the Sahara and the doctors had declared that it was a case of dengue. In such a crisis as this there was just one thing that would work better than all the medicine pills in the world put together-my mother's home food. By the time I came back to Delhi two weeks later she'd fattened me up real good. 

 On the bus ride back home I sat next to the window, as I usually do when I take a bus, and staring out at nothing in particular when I was awakened out of my reverie by a plump left arm. The arm was trying to slide the glass shut and trying to stop the chill morning air, the face numbing effect of which I was pleasantly enjoying till then. This really irritated me so I turned around with an expression angry enough to make anyone cower. But I stopped midway when I saw that the hand belonged to a middle-aged woman. There was something just so motherly about her. She felt like a mother, she smelt like a mother and her skin was soft and warm like a mother's. I started observing her from the corner of my eyes, noticing her conch shell bangles, the bindi on her forehead.

When she put her hand inside her purse to fish out something, all the memories came flooding back. Every day as soon as my mom reached home from her work the first thing I would do was grab her purse and fish through it looking for the item of the day. Every day it would be something different. Sometimes samosas or cream rolls other times rum balls or pastries. Every Sunday she would make us a special dish. aloo-puri, momo; whatever we wanted. It was a tradition she had started from the time she got her first salary.

And I always had to use her comb although this used to annoy her to her wit's end.

When I reached home from the railway station I sobbed like a child. And my mommy's warm bosom that had consoled me as a child every time I fell and scraped my knees was missing. And I’m missing her today a little more than I do every day.