This association with nation gives you meaning however primitive in its conception through sports, films touting a great victory over a rival, curated history interspersed with facts telling you how lucky you are to take birth in this most special land mass+
A doctrine shared intergenerationally normalizing affinity, not unlike religion which is similar to nationhood. All of these to ensure you find within yourself love for this idea for a geographic entity to big for you to even conceptualize in your head. +
This system works when everyone is primed to do their roles the factory worker runs the machine to create the product that needs to be sold, the doctor looks after the patients asks them to buy the exact medicines they are supposed to sell, the soldier fights +
The soldier fights not just at borders but also inside whenever a group stands up against this idea of utilitarian growth created using their raw resources and in the process excluding them. +
When we were singing the anthem at school, no one told us that when we say all Indians, we may or may not mean all of them. That when we were taught to attach divinity to the idea of the country it also meant accepting the state actions without questions. +
When a young man decided to become a soldier to protect the nation, no one told him his first deployment will be at a tribal village to point guns at an 80 year old women protesting against the capture of her tribal land illegally by a corporation. +
In his head he was still protecting the nation from her enemy except that the enemy was a feeble old women surviving on six hundred calories a day.
But most importantly no one taught him to use perhaps the most important word in the any language, ‘why?’ +
Why do we have to read the pledge or sing the national anthem? Why do we have to accept the divinity of the mother land? Why can we not ask what the country can do for me and only answer to what we can do for the country? +
The schools, family and all cultural machinery tried their best to make sure that you never learn the word why in any meaningful way because if you did you would not stand with a gun pointing at an eighty year old protestor +
If you did you'd ask why is nation a mother, and why should I love all Indians and not all humans, or when did loving all Indians become loving government policies that harm many Indians
What happens when children ask why the anthem or flag deserves respect just for existing +
or ask their parents why do we respect gods and idols as a learned, memorized behavior?
More importantly when we are asked to otherize someone else based just on their identity we would ask them why?
The system fears a why.
/End
