My earliest memories of the 15^th of August have very little to do with any feelings of patriotism or nationalism; instead it is my mother’s watery mutton  curry – which on Independence Days would be, for some reason, a little thicker in texture and darker in colour than usual  – that comes to my mind. In fact, I had never even seen the tri-colour hoisted live till I stepped out to the “mainland” for my higher studies. However, I did – rather religiously – watch proceedings at the Red Fort on Doordarshan. It’d be utterly dishonest on my part to claim though that it was a ritual borne out of an overwhelming sense of patriotism. The 15^th of August – like the 26^th of January – would be one of the very few days I’d be allowed to watch television in the morning, and in a zealous bid to make the most of my parents’ generosity, I’d sit through the entire Doordarshan telecast and end up eating breakfast in front of the television.

When I reached high school, I stopped watching the Independence Day telecast on Doordarshan  – partly out of indifference and partly because I had discovered newer vistas of entertainment. By that time, we had a colour television with a cable TV connection, and I had started to realise that Independence Day in the rest of the country was different. Back in those days when the nation didn’t want to know so much, and NDTV used to be the go-to channel, I would be awestruck by their happy visuals of colourful kites, Mother Dairy lollies and what seemed like festivities at the India Gate, for it was a world and space in stark contrast to the ghost town that I would see when I peered out of our fourth floor flat.

If there has been one thing the United Liberation Front of Assam (ULFA) has exercised immaculate discipline in ever since they went underground, it has been in declaring an Assam Bandh on Independence Day and issuing diktats to the masses to stay indoors and not take part in the Independence Day celebrations in any form. Just as I started to write this, I called my parents to enquire if a bandh has been called this year too. Yes, my father said rather nonchalantly. He wasn’t sure though if it’s the ULFA this time or some other extremist group. There are so many now that people seem to have lost count.

It was 2004 and the vernacular channels were yet to make a foray, and local news on TV was restricted to a 15-minute round-up of the day in the evening when Doordarshan switched to the Guwahati centre. So it was only in the evening that most people in Assam got to know that a bomb had set off in a school in Dhemaji, a remote district located on the north bank of the Brahmaputra. Official figures put the death toll at 18 and the number of injured at 40, the majority of which were children. Dhemaji is no stranger to catastrophes – the mighty Brahmapautra mercilessly savages its lush plains every monsoon, but even for the hardened residents of this particularly luckless district, this was a little difficult to digest, for the children killed weren’t doing much wrong. They were just participating in an Independence Day rally.

I don’t exactly remember what I was doing on August 15, 2004. In all probability I was watching an English news channel showing visuals of colourful kites soaring high in the skies of Delhi, Bollywood stars talking about what being an Indian means and politicians discussing the rapid strides we’ve made as a country in the new millennium, punctuated liberally by AR Rahman’s Vande Mataram and Lata Mangeshkar’s Aae Mere Vatan Ke Logon. All of which clinically managed to drown the wails of many a mother of one of the most remote districts of the country, which too had been trying to contribute its share to the revelry that Independence Day is.

We’re a xenophobic nation, very willingly aided by an equally jingoistic media – and occasions like the Independence Day seem to be just the perfect platforms to indulge in exercises of meaningless patriotic excesses in the form of special issues and celebrity-laden shows, which mean nothing to the majority of the population. If one went through the ‘Independence Day Special’ issues of the major Indian magazines this year, it is only Tehelka which seems to have bothered to concentrate on what’s wrong with the nation and seeks to address India’s massive but grossly underreported problem of education. The electronic media apparently just never tires of basking in hackneyed past glory and engaging in contrived debates while hardly ever bothering to dissect critically enough something as important as the Prime Minister’s address. And very importantly, it’s high time the media and the electronic media in particular, acknowledged that Delhi and India cannot be interchangeably used, and statements like ‘India is reveling in the spirit of Independence Day’ by reporters reporting from the India Gate is not only hurtfully insensitive but also ridiculously ignorant. Maybe, had the media been a little inclusive and sensitive on Independence Day in 2004, the northeast would have not seen the birth of another 20-odd insurgent groups in the next nine years.

Ironically, I spent four years of college in another conflict zone – Jharkhand. Although the small town I was in was relatively peaceful compared to the surrounding districts, poverty was rampant and the relevance of something like an Independence Day was abysmally low.  It was business as usual for most of the population, and Independence Day was in fact more of an inconvenience for a set of people who were mostly daily wage labourers and who’d go have to go to the near-by industrial town to find work.  Independence Day in those parts of the country invariably means trains being cancelled for “safety reasons” and hence hungry stomachs – while the rest of the country reveled in the spirit of Independence Day. These are stories that won’t do the jingoistic national pride of the country any good and the media, of course, conveniently refrains from reporting them. Why would they when they’d rather have an actress whose legs never seem to end talk about her next movie, which is full of nationalistic fervour?

I was home for Independence Day last year. Although things have become slightly better, people still choose to stay home and watch Independence Day on the now numerous news channels and revel in the spirit of Independence Day. And my mother told me a little secret. The mutton curry is thicker and spicier because she wants it to be mainstream Indian on Independence Day.