61 years - 61 summers 61 winters 61 monsoons, 61 billion and counting…- this is the story of what came to be called the Golden bird, the land of Spiritual renaissance, the elephant that was learning to dance, the tiger that never got it’s due and the abode of Gods.

The sum of the age digits add up to 7 - a lucky number for some, probably has several hopes pinned on now to hold lucky for not just an individual but for an entity, a nation.

India’s astrological star sign is the Leo – the Lion, if it ever means that India was really ‘born’ on 15th Aug 1947.

Though it existed long before it was born, discovered or for that matter ‘created’, India – a capricious notion - existed in various states, geographies, beliefs and spirit much before it was ‘still-born’ in it’s 19th century polity that the planet Earth is actively keeping history of now.

So after 61 years of that fateful midnight, a conflicting and fighting mass of people was shorn off - a forced caesarian of sorts of a predominantly British mother – to be recognized as an individual polity/entity, albeit with a polit-o-genetically misaligned twin attached at it’s head - a head that today is very messed up.

The train of fate for these, almost million odd men and women, fighting, conflicting at various levels of existence, hurriedly switched tracks to rush off into an unknown direction - much like a toy train that, totally ignored by a bored child - that accidentally slips off it’s toy tracks and veers off trying to balance on it’s tiny toy wheels, till either the child turns it’s attention to put it back on it’s tracks, or is left to crash somewhere, unattended.

Today, 61 years later, the toy train, is really ‘lucky’ for not having been pulled down by gravity - gravity of the situation it has found itself in, since then.

Lucky – to be still on it’s wheels, trembling, shaking, teetering on a path not designed for it’s wheels, but yet, somehow keeping itself up, balancing, yet chugging along laboriously with increasing mass - the bored child nowhere in sight - looking for those lost rails that it was probably smoothly running on up until 300 years back.

Even after 61 years, with its hurriedly chopped off psychogenesis umbilical cords still dangling from it’s disintegrating and misappropriating spirit and it’s unattended psychopathology, this entity is alive, and is considered an anomaly of sorts by – pardon the pun – even God.

Today, this growing, once-upon-a-time-stillborn entity, is still a kid at heart, though 61 years old.

The kid that wants all that the world can give it’s consumerist population; the kid that still wants to be on the stage struts its glamour stuff with the grandeur of cinema, music, with it’s ill-kept but still considerably beautiful contrasts of human life with nature; the kid that cries loud for a seat in the security council yet not being able to get past the bullies that guard the seat; the kid that wants to grow into a mature adult, but ‘luck’ in one form or another hushing down it’s need for growth…

So what does it mean - to be an Indian - 61 years later - today??? I say -

embarrassingly Proud!