Tryst With Destiny

NDTV did me a favour by playing out Jawaharlal Nehru's speech made to the Indian Constituent Assembly. " At the stroke of the midnight hour...." it starts all so familiar and then ignorant me actually heard the whole speech... The speech is truly stirring..

"That future is not one of ease or resting but of incessant striving so that we may fulfil the pledges we have so often taken and the one we shall take today. The service of India means the service of the millions who suffer. It means the ending of poverty and ignorance and disease and inequality of opportunity. The ambition of the greatest man of our generation has been to wipe every tear from every eye. That may be beyond us, but as long as there are tears and suffering, so long our work will not be over.

And so we have to labour and to work, and work hard, to give reality to our dreams. Those dreams are for India, but they are also for the world, for all the nations and peoples are too closely knit together today for any one of them to imagine that it can live apart Peace has been said to be indivisible; so is freedom, so is prosperity now, and so also is disaster in this One World that can no longer be split into isolated fragments."

As we celebrate our independence day Jawaharlal Nehru's speech remains as relevant as it was 62 years back. And therein lies the problem. 62 years and the number of millions of Indians who suffer remains staggeringly high. Poverty and ignorance rampant in our country. Yes we have prospered and have a booming economy but wiping a tear from every eye is a distant dream.

Right to Education bill got underway and soon enough the bill for Food security shall be introduced. Earnestly there has been no dearth of bills, never was. Where we have lacked is implementation of the bills. It truly would be a shame if a great initiative like the Food security is mismanaged and goes down the train. When we have statistics that claim 46% of children aged under 3 are malnourished it is a cause for concern. Ethiopia fares better than us on the index. No disrespect to Ethiopia but with a GDP like ours we surely can do much better for the kids in our country.

Going back to the speech again Nehru's word strike a cord deep within...

The future beckons to us. Whither do we go and what shall be our endeavour? To bring freedom and opportunity to the common man, to the peasants and workers of India; to fight and end poverty and ignorance and disease; to build up a prosperous, democratic and progressive nation, and to create social, economic and political institutions which will ensure justice and fullness of life to every man and woman.

We have hard work ahead. There is no resting for any one of us till we redeem our pledge in full, till we make all the people of India what destiny intended them to be. We are citizens of a great country on the verge of bold advance, and we have to live up to that high standard. All of us, to whatever religion we may belong, are equally the children of India with equal rights, privileges and obligations.....

And to India, our much-loved motherland, the ancient, the eternal and the ever-new, we pay our reverent homage and we bind ourselves afresh to her service. "