THE ILLUSION OF FREEDOM

"WHERE THE mind is without fear
And the head is held high,
Where knowledge is free…

Into that heaven of freedom, my father,
Let my country awake!"

- Rabindranath Tagore

Thus penned the great Tagore on the subject of freedom in his immortal epic Gitanjali. And this was what came to mind when my 13-year-old asked,“Mama, can we visit South City Mall in this Independence Day?"

“No, You can’t”, I shot back. “Don’t you know that Independence Day is probably the worst day for an outing as crowded places in large cities are prime targets for terrorists who happen to be moving freely in our country? Moreover, haven’t you read the recent outbreak of H1N1 virus in India. Avoid public places and crowds at all costs. Multiplexes have already been shut down in Mumbai.”

“Mama, last week when we planned to go out, there was a bandh, the one before last week it was auto-strike and now it is a virus! Are we really free to go anywhere at our own choice in our country? “
“No my dear boy, no. The country may be free but today our minds are shackled with undefined fear and confined in a prison of glorious uncertainties. Anything can frighten us and send us scurrying to the only safe place we know now – our little homes. Or is that even safe?”

Today when we go out, we are never sure when we will return ... or in some cases whether we will return at all. You send your kid to school in the morning and any trouble in the city has the potential to close down the city making his or her return uncertain. You start boarding a train and all it requires for the train to stall midway is for a few miscreants with almost any excuse ranging from a neighbourhood accident to the fallout of globalisation on the poor and downtrodden. Remove a few fish plates from the track and make your political or social presence felt across the whole country while robbing the hapless train travellers of their freedom to move. Ten years after hundreds died in the country’s financial capital because of floods resulting from rain water finding no passage to the nearby sea, the average Mumbai citizen still shudders at the music of the monsoon song!

Sixty two years ago the freedom we won was just a political freedom. For the past sixty two years, the average citizen was supposed to have been the controller of his/her own destiny. The highest number of poor people in the world live in our country – how are they free when they fear that they might not get their next meal? The largest number of terrorist-related deaths outside of Iraq happen to be in our country. How is a person free when he does not when the next bomb will blast? Despite years of subsidy and grand literacy campaigns, half of our children drop out before the tenth grade. How are they free, if they do not have the right to education? Today, if you want to have decent education, you have to shell out a lot for entry into plush private institutions. Knowledge is no longer free in this country where great gurukuls once dotted the landscape!

The real freedom comes when, as Tagore said, the mind is without fear! And the mind is without fear, when he has a reasonable control over the uncertainties of the economic, social and cultural environment around him/her. His mind can’t be without fear if he is overwhelmed by the these uncertainties at each moment of his life. Years ago, psychologist Maslow had spelt out a hierarchy of needs for humans. Safety comes second in that hierarchy, next to our basic primal needs. The need to feel sovereign, the freedom to exercise political choice is a secondary and higher-order need. Until the lower order needs, such as safety (freedom from fear) have been meet, the freedom will ring hollow in the average citizen’s ears.

That is just what happened in the small island nation of Mayotte in Africa. When a political referendum was held in that country in 2009, their people voted overwhelmingly to remain under France, their earlier colonist, rather than become an independent African nation. In 1974, they had voted similarly. In fact, in the recent referendum, the choice for remaining “dependent” had a harsh conditionality attached with it. To lose their freedom to France, this predominantly Muslim country would have to force its residents to adjust to the cultural customs of France such as raising the minimum age for women to marry from 15 to 18 and outlawing polygamy. To exercise the choice of “freedom” they did not have to do any such thing. Yet they consciously chose to inflict these counter-cultural changes on themselves, merely to remain without “freedom”.

Why did this country choose not to remain “free” when given an explicit choice? In fact, today many African nations, under such a hypothetical referendum, would probably vote to remain under their earlier colonial masters rather their own home-grown despots. Their socio-economic condition has deteriorated very fast after they attained their exalted status of freedom. For them, freedom cannot be contemplated on an empty stomach and with a frightened mind. While celebrating our freedom, let us a do a bit more this year. Let us try to search the meaning of freedom and find out whether this is the same as what was so pertinently meant by Tagore.