Happy 60th Birthday, India. What have you done with your freedom?

I've thought for a while about how to close this blog because this is my narrative of India and India does not get to choose how it ends, I do. The occasions of my departure from India and the Mataram's (motherland's) 60th birthday next week definitely call for tears, but should they come from pain or laughter? I don't even know. When things get so bleak we laugh uncontrollably, what kind of tears are those?

I don't blame anyone for feeling dissatisfaction that I can't answer the questions I have posed, but let me ask you, what am I supposed to do with a country that put the image of a man who died without any possesions on all its money? Then again, why should I ask you about India, you probably don't know much. You certainly shouldn't ask me. I'm a white kid who skulked around Delhi for a couple months, that makes me... ah yes, completely ignorant. Here's a better idea, let's ask India...

Mother India, when you are drenched in monsoon tears, why do you cry? Is it because of your hopeless poverty? Perhaps you cry because I counted hundreds of emaciated, partially clothed and naked people settling down to sleep tonight on a concrete highway divider in one of your wealthiest cities. Or, maybe you've abandoned these children of yours, Mother India. Instead you cry tears of exuberant laughter with the fashionably dressed youths zipping down this same highway, Bhangra blaring, in luxury SUVs. Mother India, do you find it easier to love these carefree and careless oligarchs to be?

The British can no longer tell you what future to make for yourself, mother India. You sent them packing 60 years ago. Although you shouted that the British oppressed you, you saw them off with a warm embrace. Did this parting hug tire your arms? Perhaps you have no strength left to shield your children. Is that why you cry, because you feel helpless to prevent the violent abuse of your Muslim and Sikh offspring? When your eyes' moisture breaks the banks of the Ganges as it is doing right now, is it because you find your minority groups increasingly ghettoized and marginalized? Or is actually because you cannot stop chuckling at how the Hindu nationalists have exposed the pretense of your secularism?

Mother India, what of the children you cast out in 1947? Have you filled the wells with your brackish sadness because your sons and daughters in Pakistan quake with fear of your nuclear weapons? Do you cry because the radiation from the Thar desert test sites burns you? Are you sobbing for the accident waiting to happen? Then again, maybe this atomic development makes you feel strong. Perhaps you cry because you laugh so triumphantly at the death you can bring to the children who abanoned you. Does the jolly thought of your new power induce these tears?

Mother India, I mean no disrespect, but you begin to look your age. Did you cry with anger as the chemicals suffocated your babies in Bhopal? Have the people-consuming factories poisoning your streams and the sputtering autos sullying your air driven you to tears? Mother India, when you seek shade in your once lush forests but find only dry stumps, do you weep then for your loss? Or are these yellow and brown clouds lined with silver and gold? Do you cry with delight as dollar bills flood your government vaults? Do you weep with relief at the sight of white faces returning to reap the harvest sown by your poorest children?

Mother India, what have you done with your freedom? Is your independence merely the freedom for a few of your favorite children to tread upon those you disdain? Is deliverance from oppression merely the means to oppress? Mother India, does your joy for the success of you sons blind you to the pain of your daughters? Mother India, do the mansions built by your wealthy children blot out the hovels of their poor siblings? Mother India, do the ringing vedas sung by your Hindu progeny drown out the fearful screams of your terrorized Muslims?

Mother India, what have you done with your freedom? How many more of your children eat better today than when the British sailed over the horizon? How many more of your daughters read today than the day mission schools started closing? How many more of your Tamils share power with their cousins from Uttar Pradesh? Some, yes, surely some, right? 60 years and a few more eat and a few more read and a few more decide. Is this the freedom for which you fought? Did Subash Chandra Bose lead his forces against the British just so you could rent Kashmir asunder? Did Tilak go into exile so Western firms could abuse the children of Bengal? Did Gandhi bleed to death so the SENSEX could set new records?

Mother India, what have you done with your freedom? Mother India, what are you doing to your children? Mother India, why do you cry? Has it all been a terrible mistake, mother India, or was this always the plan? Mother India, are you satisfied with your 60 years? Is there anything you would change Mother India? Mother India, what will you do now?