Hardly Independent

*Picture from http://blog.buzzintown.com/

*All opinions below are strictly personal.

We are a hypocritical society.

We laud our great culture of forbearance, tolerance and love, and punish our children when they marry outside the community.

We celebrate Gandhi Jayanti with Lage Raho Munnabhai on television and slap the driver who dared overtake us on the highway.

We ask our women to dress up in decent, Indian clothes and verbally and physically thrash our wives, oh-so-like Fifty Shades of Grey.

When we spot a pile of garbage outside a house on the street, we abuse the creator and decide to dump our bottle of Cola. 

We ban mobile phones for girls in order to make them secure, and then rape them mercilessly on the street, in vehicles and at home.

There is no stone left unturned to educate our boy and make him self- reliant. We then demand dowry to fund his self-reliance.

We rollout scheme after scheme and wholeheartedly put down the earlier government, and yet fail to provide basic food and health to large sections of our population.

On Independence Day, each year, we dedicate songs to our brave soldiers fighting at our borders, braving the cruel cold. We feast on laddoos and put up balloons in saffron, white and green.

And yet, in this independent land of our great freedom fighters, rich heritage and grand culture, we don’t think twice about abusing the weak, the downtrodden, or the dissenter. Indeed, the greatest spoilsport to the holiday is the fact that August 15 is a dry day.

To this day, we serve tirelessly under greed, intolerance and envy. Hardly independent, I daresay. Until we find a way out of this hypocrisy, this annual commemoration of our freedom struggle leaves me cold.