Source: Hueiyen News Service / Agency
Pune, November 07 2009:
Should Muslims sing Vande Mataram? If a Muslim likes the song, why not? The religious logic is just propaganda - bowing before anyone but Allah etc, is being stupidly literal.
I never learnt all of Vande Mataram because we generally sang Jana Gana in our (Catholic) school.
Does that make me a less patriotic Indian? How do you measure patriotism? I don't want to go to war with Pakistan or anybody.
War is stupid because it is created out of the worst parts of our leaders, like their appendix, for instance.
That is why you have a 23-year-old lieutenant becoming shahid, while the middle-aged gasbag general lives till he becomes ideologically (and physically) redundant.
Some of the hardcore Northeasterners, who sympathise with the 'different nation' ideology of the separatists, say that Jana Gana should not be 'our' national anthem because it has no mention of Assam, Manipur, Mizoram, Meghalaya, Arunachal, Nagaland, and Tripura.
There's no mention even of the region as such.
Some say Rabindranath Tagore forgot the Northeast, some say he included us when he said 'Banga'.
Try saying that to a Northeasterner: that they have been classified as 'Banga'.
That person will never invite you to a lovely pork in bamboo shoot lunch, to begin with.
Then again, a song is an artistic work and a songwriter encounters many compositional problems.
You can't be dot on or literal.
A composer has to round it up, sacrifice a bit for metre, tune, beat etc.
That way Tagore has done a pretty good job of squeezing in the 3,287,590 square kilometres that is India.