The Cockroach Republic and Dalda Nationalism

August 15 is a day I anticipate with the same dread one reserves for an impending root canal.

It is not that I long for the return of the British Crown, nor am I deficient in love for my country. My misery is entirely provoked by the annual epidemic of hysterical, synthetic virtue that grips our populace for exactly twenty-four hours. On this single day, the great Indian middle class suspends its sacred, lifelong ambition of absconding to “Kaneda,” England, or anywhere equipped with decent drainage. The daily morning ritual over tea—bemoaning “is desh ka kuch nahi ho sakta”—vanishes into thin air. Suddenly, every nukkad and residential colony bursts at the seams with rabid, chest-thumping patriots.

The choreography is painfully predictable. A petty politician—usually the local crook with the deepest pockets—arrives in a spotless white SUV to hoist the tricolour. Sweaty volunteers distribute rock-hard batatavadas and luridly orange motichoor laddus dripping with stale dalda and unearned pride. Housing societies issue pious diktats prescribing crisp khadi kurtas accessorised with tinny tricolour lapel pins.

Then comes the acoustic torture.

The public loudspeakers mount their annual assault on our eardrums. If that weren’t enough, my sanctimonious neighbour—who normally blasts M.S. Subbulakshmi’s Venkatesha Suprabhatam at dawn with enough volume to rattle my windowpanes and shatter my nerves—switches allegiances for the morning. Out goes the Carnatic prayer; in comes Lata Mangeshkar screeching Ae Mere Watan Ke Logon at a pitch calculated to terrify local stray dogs. Grown men with untaxed incomes dab their eyes with handkerchiefs, fully prepared to resume cheating the municipal corporation first thing tomorrow morning.

Then we stand to attention and roar the National Anthem—an exercise whose volume is always inversely proportional to any comprehension of its words.

Consider Rabindranath Tagore’s 1911 roll-call: Punjab, Sind, Gujarat, Maratha, Dravida, Utkala, Banga. Three-quarters of Punjab and the entirety of Sindh celebrated their independence the day before under a Pakistani flag. Half of Bengal belongs to a sovereign neighbouring state. The four vast, distinct, and linguistically belligerent states of the South are casually compressed into a single, lazy footnote called “Dravida.” Meanwhile, the entire Northeast, the Western and Eastern Ghats, our coastlines, and our islands do not even merit a passing nod. We bellow an obsolete pre-partition atlas with religious hysteria, never once noticing that our geography lesson is over a century out of date.

Here, I would like to extend a warm invitation to our zealous ‘Congress-Mukt Bharat’ brigade—those tireless crusaders who spend their waking hours furiously renaming streets, rewriting textbooks, and purging every lingering ghost of the grand old party. If you are truly so obsessed with dismantling everything stamped with the seal of the old regime, why stop at Mughal gardens and Nehruvian welfare schemes? Why not turn your eagle-eyed revisionism toward the national anthem? You are lustily saluting a 1911 colonial-era roll-call that includes territories of our arch-rival while entirely skipping the Northeast and the peninsular coast. If you are going to rewrite the past, you might as well look at the map you are actually singing.

The deeper tragedy is that we have made independence into a fossilized museum exhibit, pretending the struggle ended on a single midnight in August 1947.

We forget that every generation has had to wage its own brawl against state arrogance. In 1975, when Indira Gandhi clamped down the Emergency, our own jails faithfully re-enacted the brutal sadism of the British Raj—the only difference being that the lathis were now wielded by brown sahibs against their own countrymen. And when our decorated athletes and protesting citizens were dragged across the asphalt at Jantar Mantar in broad daylight, the ghost of General Dyer must have smiled in approval at how effortlessly modern Indian authority replicates the spirit of Jallianwala Bagh. The uniform changes; the appetite to crush dissent remains identical.

Yet we reduce this ongoing tug-of-war to a pantomime of personalities: Gandhi’s moral puritanism versus Savarkar’s civilisational bluster, or Nehru versus Modi. We are 1.4 billion people, yet we perpetually behave like helpless toddlers searching for a single stern patriarch to run our lives, dictate our diets, and do our thinking for us.

Real freedom is not a government handout, nor is it preserved by saluting flags while remaining terrified of local police inspectors. Freedom survives through what I call the Cockroach Janta Party—that stubborn, unkillable breed of citizen who scurries out from beneath the floorboards of power, utterly refusing to be squashed, swept aside, or fumigated by the state’s pest-control squad. A nation rots not from foreign invasions, but from the cowardly obedience of its educated citizens who trade their conscience for peace, promotions, and greasy laddus.

Tomorrow, on August 16, the flags will be lying forgotten. The loudspeakers will shut down. The dalda aftertaste will fade, and our brave patriots will return to their computer screens to check the status of their Canadian visa applications.

True independence is not exchanging white masters for brown ones while keeping one’s mouth shut. It is the raw, stubborn independence of the individual mind—the freedom to argue, to debunk sacred cows, and to laugh heartily at our self-appointed moral overlords. It is only when the mind is truly without fear that we might finally give meaning to Tagore’s immortal plea: Into that heaven of freedom, my Father, let my country awake.

And on that note, a humble plea to Brodha V: my dear man, if you have any mercy left for this republic, please compose a high-octane Kannada-English rap version of Venkatesha Suprabhatam. It is the only thing that might finally save my sanity from my neighbour’s morning playlist.