It would have taken a mad man to ask on the momentous night of 15 Aug 1947 as to what have we gained. We know it as our independence day, the night that we made our tryst with destiny. But if someone was still mad enough to ask, what have we really gained, in unison perhaps the whole nation would have uttered… ‘Freedom’.
However, if he were to persists as to what exactly they mean by this term freedom, I am sure most would have faltered there are then rationally justify it. Most would have invoked the strongest emotions of patriotism and nationality and self governance and so and so forth, but failing to justify how exactly by replacing a white skinned man with a brown skinned one (of their choice indeed!), have they achieved freedom?

Nothing much had in fact changed in our nation that day, we follow until this very day, the laws and regulation as in our penal code were borrowed or rather copied in totality from the British pre independence laws. Our civic and public administration, law enforcement mechanism everything functions almost in the very same manner as it used to function in pre independence era. The constitution and fundamental right that we presumably enjoy in our nation are also equally revocable by the government, if it deems it necessary. This makes our so called freedom a set of privileges that we enjoy at the mercy of our present rulers. Of course, we can change them, elect new ones, but how much it alters the freedom and liberty that we enjoy in our day to life is still questionable.
Our societies have not changed either; we are still bound by numerous social and cultural traditions, biased based on caste creed and religion. We still have instances of honor killings in our society. The society not only supports such an act but also at times forces the families to commit such heinous crime. There are instances of dowry based crimes, incidences of witch hunting, not to mention numerous instances of domestic violence that goes rather unnoticed and very much with the sanction of our society and families. So where exactly have we found that elusive but celebrated freedom.

Our economic freedom too is similarly crippled, after Independence we embraced a much stifling socialistic setup than the British. Hong Kong continued with UK for another five decades or so and one can see the visible economic and infrastructural growth that it had in the so called foreign regime. We still need license or government permissions for starting an enterprise in our nation. Our property rights are still very much colonist, while we have the right of acquisition of land/ property, the government still reserves the right to cease our assets under special circumstances. Of course, there are laws that prevent blatant misuse of these powers but we have seen in near past itself many instances of government abusing its power. Objective of the government may seem at times very noble, setting up industries or SEZ, but the very fact that the government is trying to bulldoze it ways to acquire lands at minimum rates from unwilling farmers violates our fundamental rights. If an industrialist really sees profit in such acquisition and an enterprise there off let him buy the land at the price the farmer is willing to sell. After all everything has a price. I am sure land can be acquired in India without government interfering also.

If a question is asked as to what will you classify the ones who steal from you, your freedom you would instantaneously declare them as your biggest enemy. Irony it is that no one realizes that the one who enslave us are the ones whom we call as our own, our peers, society and state.

We teach our kids from the very childhood that Lion is the king of the jungle; we honor the greatest predator as the ruler of the jungle, inadvertently legitimizing the tyranny of the ruler over the subjects. Oppression and exploitation of subjects by the ruler is taken be us so granted, that we seldom feel suffocated in its python grip laws and regulation, the sad reality of our so called free world.
Intention here is not to get into a cribbing session, lampooning about all that is wrong with the world around us. I believe over the centuries our civilization and humanity at large has progressed in leaps and bounds. We indeed enjoy much higher freedom than what our ancestors really did, and also because they struggled for it, we enjoy the fruit of their labor. Objective out here was to make people realize that the journey is far from over, making people question their idea of freedom. The idea that they have cherished for so long, the idea that men are willing to live for and Die for… This idea has in fact evolved with time in the collective consciousness of mankind and each time it has been challenged it has led to revolutions.

I am writing at this site for the first time so I wanted to start with subject in hand in general. There are hundreds of articles in this site and other such sites, which echo similar thoughts. Attempt here is to make people wake up from their slumber and realize that they are not actually free, that their freedom is still held at abeyance by the state and society at large. If we are able to sent across this message then I guess we have achieved our objective, the day the collective conscious of our society would wake up to this reality, we would have on that