By Savitri Narayanan
“Dadaji, you are always on this armchair reading the newspaper!” Vaibhav pleaded, “Let’s do something!”
“Sure beta,” smiled dadaji, “What do you want us to do?”
“Let’s go swimming!”
“Only if you promise to have a swimming race with me,” dadaji got up.
“As if you know swimming,” said Vaibhav.
“You were not even born when I was the swimming champion in my college,” dadaji roared with laughter.
“Why don’t you go to the Town Hall,” said papaji who was listening to this exchange.
Vaibhav stayed with his parents in Bhopal, while dadaji continued to live in their ancestral home. Every year, around Diwali, he came down from the hills to escape the cold.
It was fun to have dadaji around. He had a good sense of humour and had a lot of interesting stories to narrate. Dadaji also played cards or boardgames like Funschool with Vaibhav and his friends.
“Shall I pack some lunch for you?” asked mummyji.
“Of course not, bahu,” dadaji laughed. “We’ll have a blast, will eat up all the food in their canteen.”
The Town Hall was not so crowded. Leisurely they walked on, pausing to see the exhibits.
“You like water colours, right?” Vaibhav was taken aback.
True, he liked art, was good at colouring and had even won a prize in the inter-school painting competition. How did dadaji know that he liked painting?
“Art is a medium of communication,” said Dadaji. “We communicate using words as a tool, an artist uses brushes and colours!”
“Wow! Look at this, Dadaji,” Vaibhav paused in front of a painting.
“What’s it that you like about this piece of art?” Dadaji too looked at the painting.
“The choice of colours,” Vaibhav paused and murmured, “And something else, the picture seems to come alive!”
“You mean the girl actually seems to be running with the flag?” Dadaji’s question was humorous yet serious.
“We also run with our house flags for our sports day,” said Vaibhav as they moved on.
“A flag is a symbol, a statement; it represents certain values.” With those words they headed for a vacant bench on the side and sat down.
“Yes dadaji, I know what our national flag stands for,” said Vaibhav. “There’s a lesson in our Social Studies book; we’ve learnt a song about our flag too.”
“Can you imagine a time when we used to raise and salute a different flag?”
“What do you mean?”
“Those were the days of colonial rule,” said dadaji. “Many people, for many years, in many ways, had to fight and even sacrifice their lives to get our freedom.”
‘Wonder what’s this big thing about freedom? Why make such a big fuss about it?’ thought Vaibhav, but what he asked was, “Now that we’ve got freedom, what’s our next goal, dadaji? What should we fight for?”
Dadaji looked thoughtfully at Vaibhav for a while and responded, “Glad you asked this question beta, it shows you’re intelligent and keen to know!”
He leaned back and relaxed on the bench as he continued, “There’s a lack of direction among the youth today; now’s the time to fight for freedom of a different kind!”
“What do you mean? Freedom from whom?”
“The world is changing in subtle ways, beta! Unless we watch out, we could easily become a nation of consumers.”
“Meaning?”
“Meaning, instead of doing our work ourselves, we start depending upon others to do it for us! As a nation we need to grow our own foodgrains, strengthen our own industries instead of getting these from other countries!”
“I know dadaji,” Vaibhav brightened up. “We learn about the green revolution, white revolution, industrial revolution, etc.”
“That’s it! To be self-sufficient means to stand on our own feet.”
“But there are so many countries in this world, we’ve to help each other, isn’t it?”
“Of course, yes! But we must seek help only for what we can’t do, import only what we can’t produce, isn’t it? If we turn lazy and stop growing our foodgrains we’ll become a market for other countries. It’s like borrowing money! Keep borrowing and soon we’ll be in the debt-trap, we’ll be slaves – a different kind of slaves!”
Vaibhav’s response was immediate.
“Don’t worry dadaji, we won’t let it happen!”
Dadaji continued thoughtfully, “The tree with strong roots can spread far and wide; similarly, it’s a self-sufficient nation that can reach out to help others!”
They continued to sit on the bench for a while thinking about the conversation.
“Dadaji, let’s look for the canteen,” Vaibhav got up with a smile, “We’ve got to empty it, isn’t it?”
(Savitri Narayanan is a retired educationist at present in Goa. A mother and grandmother, loves reading, writing and travelling.)
