August 15, what?

We excel in our indifference to national symbols. And always we blame the 8216;system8217;

Chinese basketball hero Yao Ming carried the Chinese flag at the Olympics opening ceremony. And there was a faux pas, unnoticed by most. With Yao Ming walked nine-year-old Lin Hao, a survivor of the Sichuan earthquake and a hero because he rescued two school-mates. Lin Hao carried the Chinese flag upside down and Xinhua promptly withdrew the photograph and apologised. Today, 15th August, there will be several such instances in India. Flags will be hoisted upside down. They will be left lying around, littering the ground. After all, there have been such incidents in the past, on the 15th of August and on the 26th of January. How can you blame private citizens if government gets it wrong? On the 27th of January last year, the central government issued an advertisement for Rajiv Gandhi Grameen Vidyutikaran Yojana in West Bengal 8212; and got the flag upside down. Occasionally, celebrities like Malini Ramani, Mandira Bedi, Sachin Tendulkar and Sania Mirza will be targeted, often by publicity-seekers.

Admittedly, one shouldn8217;t make fetishes of the national flag and anthem. Not everyone need be Naveen Jindal. But we do have a problem with national symbols. The fetish argument would have been acceptable had we felt proud of being Indians and exhibited it in other ways. The Chinese have taken visible pride in organising the Olympics, but national pride there certainly predates them. Consider also how football or cricket teams line up when national anthems are played. For every other country, team-members will mouth, if not sing, national anthems. How many times have you witnessed Indian team-members doing that? Had we possessed such pride, the fiasco at the opening ceremony wouldn8217;t have occurred. That8217;s a ceremonial occasion. Not long ago, I watched a documentary about what the Australian contingent would wear for it, and how meticulously it had been planned and designed. They clearly took pride in representing Australia. An Indian team doesn8217;t take pride in representing India. Otherwise, Sania Mirza and Sunitha Rao wouldn8217;t have turned up in training gear. The chef-de-mission8217;s argument that there was no time to change will not wash. A Bindra gold shouldn8217;t make the issue disappear.

Was the ceremony an impromptu affair or was it pre-announced? Obviously, the latter. So why wasn8217;t training scheduled appropriately? What is worse is Suresh Kalmadi8217;s statement: 8220;It is no big deal as it is being made out.8221; Precisely, it is no big deal. The fact we don8217;t feel proud of being Indian is no big deal either. If we have done well, that8217;s in spite of the system, not because of it. Such views are usually articulated most by those who are major beneficiaries of the system.

Even if one forgets these so-called fetishes, do we care about our national treasures and heritage? CBI closed the case about the theft of Tagore8217;s Nobel medal, gold watch, ornaments and ivory artifacts. The crime hasn8217;t been solved. No one has been held accountable. All one is wrangling about is insurance claims from the National Insurance Company. No big deal. Rare books, manuscripts and letters related to Tagore, Netaji, Sarat Chandra Chatterjee and Sarojini Naidu have been stolen from the National Library, Kolkata. We don8217;t even know what has been stolen, because the register of the Rare Books Division has also been stolen or misplaced. No big deal.

In Kolkata8217;s Rajya Charukala Parshad, paintings by Rabindranath, Abanindranath and Jamini Roy are being destroyed. No big deal again, and West Bengal is the norm rather than the exception. There is the inevitable argument about the government8217;s lack of financial resources. To some extent, this is valid and there are opportunity costs of public resources and questions about prioritisation of expenditure. But this is a simpler problem to solve, since one can outsource to the private sector 8212; and not necessarily to the corporate private sector. Perhaps the non-government sector is a better term to use. The non-government sector will not only be more efficient at maintaining national assets, it will also be more efficient at generating revenue, a percentage of which can be passed on to government. Unfortunately, it isn8217;t that simple. For this to work, the non-government sector needs a sense of national pride and there is no evidence that this exists. The answer can8217;t be in our genes. Indians who have become first-generation Americans are extremely proud of being American, even more so than seventh-generation Americans. The experience is no different in other countries. Consequently, the answer is indigenous to India.

We may be proud of our glorious past and our glorious future. But we aren8217;t yet proud of the present, because being proud of the present is tantamount to being proud of the system. We think we are what we are, in spite of the system. We owe nothing to the system. If we have done well, and are relatively rich, we have learnt to manipulate the system, because the system has become malleable. In 2004, President Abdul Kalam delivered a speech reminiscent of John Kennedy. 8220;You say that our government is inefficient. You say that our laws are too old. You say that the municipality does not pick up the garbage. You say that the phones don8217;t work, the railways are a joke, the airline is the worst in the world, mail never reaches its destination. You say that our country has been fed to the dogs and is the absolute pits. You say, say and say. What do you do about it?8221; That8217;s rhetorical, because the answer is 8212; nothing at all. Economic growth alone won8217;t change matters and make us proud of India. How and when did this decline occur? There is always the danger of falling prey to the GOD good old days syndrome. But one suspects that deterioration wasn8217;t marked till the early 1960s.

The assault on the main organs of state for political ends began in the second half of the 1960s and became even more acute in the 1970s, with these effects gradually spreading everywhere. We didn8217;t protest collectively then and we don8217;t know how to reverse the trend now. President Thomas Whitmore said in 1996 8212; that8217;s a movie president, in case you are wondering, from a Hollywood blockbuster of that year 8212; 8220;Today we celebrate our Independence Day.8221; Is that what we really do? Or will pride in India go quietly into the night?

The writer is a noted economist

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