To Be or Not To Be

A little kingdom I possess,
Where thoughts and feelings dwell;
And very hard the task I find
Of governing it well.
~ Louisa May Alcott

...that more or less describes my situation!

~A Wise Man Said~

It is the mark of an educated mind to be able to entertain a thought without accepting it.
~ Aristotle
Wednesday, August 14, 2019
 
What does it mean to love one’s country? In one sense it’s only a geographical area but in another sense it is not about geography or anything material at all…you owe your essence to it in a way that you cannot see yourself being the person that you are if you were born or raised in any other part of the world than where you were.
After my last post I couldn’t help thinking if one would get the impression that I love my country or my culture less because there are so many aspects that I don’t seem able to relate with or that I am critical of. The fact is that I do not believe that loving one’s country or culture means that you find everything about it to be perfect or flawless. Indeed, it is because you’re so deeply immersed but of an independent mind that you are able to objectively yet empathetically see the good as well as the bad side of it. I guess if you were one or the other, that is, so deeply immersed that you couldn’t take an outside perspective or so independent that you could not adopt an inside perspective, the view would be skewed indeed. 
This brings to mind the Priyanka Chopra episode that’s hit the news in the last few days. Without going into the details, Indian Bollywood celebrity and UNICEF Goodwill Ambassador Priyanka Chopra seems to think (as indeed many narrow minded people do) that to be patriotic is to see everything that one’s country (or its rulers which is the same thing politically) does as the right thing and to support it unconditionally even if it is as outrageous as war. The term ‘patriotic’ itself seems to become something of a weapon in the hands of such people because they adopt it to automatically take over a moral high ground and those who contest them become ‘unpatriotic’ for speaking up ‘against the country’. I would say that those who speak up against the country for the good of the country are far more patriotic in the real sense of the term because they care about the moral essence or integrity of their country which is independent of its temporary rulers and their personal ideologies…as opposed to those who pretend to show a blind devotion to their country but in the process erode its very essence—which again is not something fixed in time but must continuously evolve into what the best that the country has produced would make it. 
To twist Brutus’ phrase, it is not that one loves one’s country less, but that one loves truth more… and to my mind, there is no better way to honour one’s country than to honour the values it must stand for.
Wish all my Indian friends a very happy Independence Day!

posted by Sylvia D'souza at 7:52 pm 0 comments
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