Every August 15, the country wakes up unusually early, not out of patriotism but because every street and apartment block is blaring Mere Desh Ki Dharti and Vande Mataram on loop through Ahuja speakers, which were last repaired when Nehru was still around. 

At schools, children are dressed as freedom fighters: half as Gandhi, half as Subhas Chandra Bose, and at least one confused kid turns up as Salman Khan from Tere Naam in a wig, insisting he’s APJ Abdul Kalam.

It has a beauty to it, like a carnival balanced between joy, chaos, and duty.

Back in my school days, the incentive to wake up early on Independence Day was simple: one free ladoo. If your school was slightly posh, you also got a Bengali sweet and a samosa. There was an unspoken rule that someone had to “offer” a performance to the nation. 

When I was nine, I sang Shankar Mahadevan’s Breathless on my school stage, a lung-capacity stress test disguised as a song. My lungs, still unspoiled by Delhi’s toxic air, could match its nonstop rhythm. In an academic culture built on rote learning, what we proudly call rattafication, memory was the highest form of talent, and I remembered every word to earn that respect. The song itself was gibberish, what we might now call "yapping" in internet lingo, and the only modern equivalent is a BJP spokesperson listing the government’s achievements without pausing for breath.

Back then, my favourite anthem was Hum Honge Kamyab Ek Din, a tame Hindi cousin of We Shall Overcome, a song that once carried the revolutionary weight of America’s civil rights marches. By the time it floated onto All India Radio, the clenched fist had morphed into the Instagram wave emoji. It was no longer meant to challenge power but to amuse it, performed before principals nodding politely and politicians clapping on cue. This is how India prefers its rebellion, imported, declawed, and delayed until the chief guest rolls in with a Toyota Fortuner.

But in 2025, even that harmless optimism has been traded for an angry aggression.

The loudest channel of the nation is named Republic isn’t just a simple irony in this republic. Hum honge kamyab now replaced by Arambh Hai Prachand set to lo-fi and ‘revererbed’ beats, urging people to rise, fight, and confront… something. What exactly, no one can say. 

This is also a country where many of its most privileged citizens believe they are trapped and must reclaim and get freedom from something they cannot define. Ironically, it is often those with the most rights who feel the deepest connection to the chorus of Sadda Haq from Rockstar.

Once, at an airport, I met a man who told me that real independence would be the day reservations are abolished, and he said it with the solemnity of someone discussing the abolition of slavery. Others believe true freedom will come when all “Western influence” is washed away, in the foamy style of a Tide detergent ad, leaving us “truly Indic.” And of course, there’s the familiar claim that real independence is when “the majority enjoys as many rights as the minority enjoys,” usually said by someone whose idea of rights includes the right to be deluded. 

Freedom and entrapment here are happy illusions, mirages that keep everyone believing the real thing is still coming, just not this year.

Every year, the same social media post appears with the consistency of a Gurgaon flood: “Are we really free? Kya hum sach mein azaad hain?” Although I think if you look closer you’ll find that India might actually be freer than the so-called  “land of the free.”

Let me give you some examples. 

Tagore imagined a place where the mind is without fear and the head is held high. The closest India has come to that vision is a man in a Thar on a Monday evening. He moves between lanes with the casual authority of someone rearranging furniture in his own living room. Traffic lights are background decoration, horns are his way of clearing his throat, and speed limit signs matter as much as cigarette warnings to a chain smoker. 

He is poetry in motion, though mostly the kind that rhymes with insurance claims. The Indian road is not governed by rules, only by the collective tolerance for other people’s madness. Hindi writer Parsai once wrote: हमारे देश का आदमी नियम मान ही नहीं सकता। वह मुक्त आत्मा है। वह सड़क के बीच चलकर प्राण दे देगा, पर बायें नहीं चलेगा। (The people of our country simply cannot follow rules. He is a free soul. He will walk in the middle of the road and give up his life, but he will not walk on the left side.)

Even cinema enjoys its own unregulated liberty. If you are approved by the power, then a filmmaker can release a historical drama where history is distorted and recreated in the offices of Andheri West, Mumbai. It will still clear the censor board, be sold as truth, and be celebrated as patriotism. 

And then there is the market, where food delivery apps grant you the ultimate freedom to never leave the house and order anything you want, brought to you by underpaid workers waiting for the next notification on a phone wrapped in a plastic waterproof cover that only partly saves it in the rain.

The news channels are free to completely break up with facts, get away with fake news, and run whatever they wish against a backdrop of anxiety-inducing music and loud, relentless graphics that may be responsible for half the nation’s rising blood pressure. The only accountability they recognise is the balance in their bank accounts.

Even corruption here enjoys the liberties of art. A corrupt man will not only survive, but he will be encouraged to improvise and be trained in new art. There is no real punishment, only an unending menu of settlements. Or if you are lucky, then you can also be a podcast guest explaining your ‘version of truth.’

Even political parties enjoy their own version of freedom. When in power, they can say almost any hate-filled thing they want, with a good chance the Election Commission will be sitting there with its noise-cancelling headphones on.

In the quiet alleys of India, independence sometimes takes a farcical stage. In Ghaziabad, Harshvardhan Jain, 47, spent nearly a decade running the “Embassy of Westarctica,” a nation that exists only in his head, from a rented bungalow. Outside, the flags of India and Westarctica fluttered for no one. Inside were forged diplomatic passports, stamps for borders that did not exist, and paperwork for micronations like Seborga and Ladonia. He kept four luxury cars with fake diplomatic plates, a watch collection fit for an oil sheikh, and introduced himself as an ambassador or adviser to these imaginary states. On July 22, 2025, the Uttar Pradesh Police raided the premises. For years, he conducted a foreign policy without a country, and surprisingly without any laser-eye edits.

In Noida’s Sector 70, six men rented a small office and declared it the headquarters of the International Police and Crime Investigation Bureau. They had everything a state might need, except the state itself: official-looking logos, forged IDs, plastic badges, and a website that collected donations as if law enforcement were a crowdfunding project. They issued papers, posed as international lawmen with fake ties to Interpol, and sold the illusion of protection. It was a police station franchise, as if Haldiram’s had launched a new outlet. On August 10, 2025, Gautam Budh Nagar Police raided the office, arresting six men who were exercising their freedom to identify as policemen who cleared the state police exams.

Independence here comes in many varieties. In one viral clip, Lallantop’s Saurabh Dwivedi is stopped on the streets of Begusarai by a man best remembered for saying Kanhaiya mera bada bhaiyaa. But hidden in the banter was an odd question he asked: when was India independent? Not the date, the day. Turns out it was a Friday. Independence arrived on a weekend, the kind of day when offices empty early, plans are made for doing nothing, and even the ambitious slow down. Now, in an era when billionaires preach 70-hour work weeks as if exhaustion were a virtue, it turns out the Republic began in the calendar’s laziest hours. Maybe that is also a metaphor of how freedom is linked to a holiday, a lazy yawn, something to mark, not necessarily to use.

This is how, by evening, paper and plastic flags seem to find their way onto the roads, their bamboo sticks jutting out like abandoned toothpicks. The sugar rush of ladoo has crashed into fatigue, loudspeakers are now silent. Sweepers and scrap pickers arrive, inheriting the remains of freedom. In malls, Freedom Sale banners come down, tiranga cakes replaced by blueberry cakes, and mannequins lose their Tricolor kurta pajama and slip into low-waist denims. The 15 percent discounts vanish. Prices go up, patriotism goes down. 

On the surface, it is a performance. It is the yearly reminder of a date when something monumental happened, wrapped in ritual and repetition.

Independence Day is often mistaken for the finish line, when it was meant to be a pit stop. A brief halt to see how far we have travelled from the grand declarations at the birth of the republic, and how much of that journey still exists only in speeches and preambles. Freedom’s worth isn’t in its choreography but in its stubborn survival through ordinary days, when no one’s watching, and the work of liberty, messy, unglamorous, often invisible, grinds on in the shadows of a nation too busy to notice.

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