The rising, circa 2007

SOCIETY

As I write this, we are revisiting 1857. Or at least some of us are. A holiday is in the offing, volunteers are marching from Meerut to Delhi and congregating at the Red Fort, and even in Pakistan and Bangladesh celebrations are afoot "" most notably by branches of the Deoband-based Jamiat Ulema-e-Hind which, supposedly, had played a role in the proceedings back then.

But what does all this mean to ordinary, young people like us rushing to complete an honest day's work and balance it with quality recreational time with friends and family or in the anonymity of clubs or pubs?

That history and politics are increasingly irrelevant to urban, dollar-aspiring Gen X and Y is not a new perception. Economics and entertainment quite visibly take up much more of the mindspace here and symbolic upholdings of the nation state concept are just that "" symbolic. If May 11 is being celebrated in the metros, it could well be because the workforce is happy with an extra day off and an extended weekend.

In cases where people do need to go out and earn their living (like for us on Bahadur Shah Zafar Marg, Delhi's "Fleet Street"), there's minor irritation "" not at having been deprived of a rest-day but because beefed-up security measures that come in the wake of so many dignitaries wanting to partake of the limelight on show-off occasions such as these actually make it impossible for us to even get to work!

I could go on carping about ceremonial trappings in a modern, still-"developing" superpower, but let's go on to a different track: what exactly are we celebrating? Is it merely a historical episode that the "younger generation must be better acquainted with". Or is it our First War of Independence, as "nationalist" (as against Left-leaning historians) like to dub it?

Savarkar, of course, was the first to call it as such. But no amount of myth-creating (including on celluloid, in versions such as the Aamir Khan-starrer Mangal Pandey that deservedly flopped at the BO) has been able to obliterate other, earlier readings of the mutiny "" that it was essentially a far-from-cohesive uprising of disparate, interested parties, including soldiers and feudal lords, against the ambitions and policies of the East India Company.

On the other hand, what comes across quite clearly even to a fledgling student of history (people like me, who took it as a "subsi", subsidiary subject in college) is that this was really the first time (or at least since the idyllic days of the Great Mughals) that the Hindus and the Muslims came together for a common, political purpose, overcoming their many insecurities vis-a-vis each other.

As we celebrate 150 years of ostensibly the First War of Independence, is this an ideal of inclusiveness that we are prepared to uphold? And what about politicians like Narendra Modi who will probably be posturing, tricolour in the background?

But why blame select individuals; politicians, a deeply-fractured bureaucracy, encounter cops? Fact is, hold a mirror to your own company of "normal", educated, aspiring youth and you will find a face contorted with suspicion.

Religious boundaries are today more firmly etched in the hearts and minds of the BPO generation than they were even a decade or two ago "" when the good nuns in schools such as mine instilled firm beliefs in entire generations about equality before the Lord and religious harmony.

As we lit our candles in tiny chapels before exam days, the only divisions in our hearts possibly referred to our "houses". Not to South and North, OBC and creamy layer, Hindus, Muslims and Christians. If we have to indulge in rituals then, let them hold up ideals such as these.