Short Essay: Rethinking Independence Day
Independence Day, for children, means flags, buntings, badges, caps, hooters and all that is available at the Azadi stall to decorate the person, the bicycle and the rooftop. (For toddlers, it does not go beyond a white-and-green dress picked by the parent.) For a lass, it stands for the right occasion to put on the Azadi dress in order to take the perfect DP (we take DPs, not photographs) that could include her in the e-celebration of Independence, exclusively carried out on FB, Instagram and Twitter. Her celebrations would end with the photo session. For a lad, it gives at least one day (at most two nights and one day) of complete (out of control) freedom: they sit on the car windows orone-wheel with double-sawari, and dance amidst traffic jam that is created by their over-crowded cars and silencer-less bikes, not to mention the volume of their music systems and the nature of their comments on women. (It is only on Independence Day that they are at their lowest: they are not