Where joy resides

A day when two age-old rivals go head-to-head to inch towards lifting a cup, a World Cup, in a sport that is so ingrained in the national psyche that it’s considered a cliché; now to associate it with a billion dreams, is perhaps as good a day as any, to ask: how patriotic do you feel? Because today’s a day people will be feeling closer than ever to that intangible called national fervour.

Even as the Great Game points to camaraderie in the shining spirit of sport, where keeping differences aside for the duration, two national leaders will be watching the match together — if there’s ever a day when one wants to tom-tom national sentiment from the rooftops, it is today. However jingoistic or ethnocentric one appears, this is a day when all will be forgiven. So why not talk about that which connects us so unerringly to the motherland — our national anthem.

Not because it’s the World Cup and its cricket and like all international sports events, the nation’s anthem plays before each team plays. Or because before each match the cameras pan faces — the team, the stands, the people — and magnified for a split second, show us real life, mirrored onscreen every raw sentiment about the tune that defines each of our countries. Not even because swept up in the mood, spontaneous clapping breaks out after each anthem, anticipatory cheers resounding in stadiums.

Let’s talk about it because here, in Maharashtra, the national anthem is not just played on special occasions — Republic Day, Independence Day, sports events — or at children’s sports meets. The people here have a more familiar connect to the anthem, because the state government, way back in 2003, decided to reintroduce it, after two decades of discontinuation, into theatres and movie halls.

I remember an editor at the time was rather cynical — he believed patriotism should not be forced down people’s throats, people who’ve come to movie halls to unwind especially and perhaps do not want to confuse gravitas and levity.

The move was anyway upheld and we all now stand to attention at theatre screenings. That editor wasn’t alone in being cynical; other voices, from other states have questioned the move now and then. But time is proving otherwise, somehow.
Because all the big screen movies I’ve gone to — without exception, over all these years, and over all the variations of visual presentation of the anthem — I don’t know a single instance where people haven’t stood up, to attention, when the familiar notes begin. A week or so ago, watching a recent rendering of the anthem — a silent one where hearing and speech impaired children salute the flag in sign language — a friend who’d just given up her Indian citizenship sobbed unrestrainedly.

In the manner of sudden epiphanies, I understood her personal poignancy in holding on to that moment.  Moreover, I’ve witnessed a scene wherein a youngster called a stranger in a row up ahead to task for not standing straight enough (sportsmen seem to have the edge — there is an ease, a certain simplicity in their stance whilst saluting both the anthem and the flag and it’s often caught on camera. Most sportsmen, not just cricketers; maybe because it’s internal, they really do represent the nation.).

Meanwhile, there will be those who believe this write-up is much too rah-rah. To them, I’m saying: indulge me, in the general spirit of things around — the zeitgeist, especially on this day, allows for it. And I’m hoping at the end of today, the match all played out, the mood might be even more celebratory?!