The (Anti)Patriotic Speech

The following is the content of one of the speeches I gave at the Toastmasters Club in my company.

I am not a Patriot. I’m not even much of an Indian.

I can’t speak good Hindi. I can’t even speak my own mother tongue, Telugu, fluently. English is the language I’m most comfortable with, and I’m infamous for telling people that I only reply in English because I “think” in English. I watch English movies and serials, listen to English music, eat international cuisine. I’ve probably been to more cities in the US than I have in India.

I am not a Patriot.

As soon as I finished my bachelor’s degree in Chennai, I flew to the US for my Master’s, thus becoming a willing contributor to the “brain drain”. It doesn’t matter, of course, that I came back to India in less than three years. After all, nobody asks or cares what your intentions in going abroad were. You don’t need to know if I always intended to come back with skills I knew I wouldn’t be able to gain here. You don’t need to know that I like living in India much more I like living in the US. All that matters is that I left of my own volition. That’s all you need to make a claim that I’m being unpatriotic.

I am not a Patriot.

I don’t care much for “Indian” traditions and customs. For example, I don’t respect all my elders. You see, I have the temerity to believe that respect should be earned.

I am not a Patriot.

I don’t follow any of the Hindu traditions I was raised to. I don’t see what our religious practices have to do with the idea of God; I have a secular outlook. It doesn’t matter that I pray for the well-being of my friends and family; that I go to temples often, and I like their atmosphere of peace and calm. After all, I just admitted that I don’t believe in the Gods of my religion. (Sharp intake of breath) What a huge sin I have committed! How can I call myself a dutiful Indian after that!

It’s interesting then, that on the day of my graduation, I went to a temple in my college campus to give my thanks to God, and found it pretty much deserted. The very same temple, by the way, had been full on the weekend before the exams.

I am not a Patriot.

In fact, I might even qualify as a traitor. You see, one of my good friends is a Pakistani. I met her at a bridge tournament in Beijing, and we’ve been excellent friends since then. The right Indian mentality should be “Bomb every single Pakistani off the face of the Earth,” am I correct? But I would be positively horrified at that. I think that if citizens were to be held accountable for the actions of their governments, almost every human being on the planet would be hanged, including us.

Going by conventional yardsticks, it doesn’t matter that I insisted that a portion of my first salary from both my research assistantship and my job at Sabre go to a charitable cause. It doesn’t matter that I have played bridge for our country at the international level, and I still consider representing our country as one of my most meaningful ambitions in life. How can these things possibly count against all the anti-Indian things that I do?

Come to think of it, even the people I admire in my life are not patriotic. My mother can never remember who is our current President or Prime Minister. She doesn’t know our country’s stance on world issues, or our defense capabilities. What she knows is how to be a shining role model and inspiration for thousands of women, being one of the top woman entrepreneurs in South India. What she knows is how to do social service, and how to empower and uplift women. That’s probably very un-Indian of her, too: going against our time-honoured tradition of discriminating against women.

I have a friend here in Bangalore, who did her bachelors and her masters in the US. She came back, and rather than take up any of several high-paying jobs, she chose to work for an NGO in the daytime. In the evenings, she works for a non-profit organization on teaching English to underprivileged kids. But she’s very unpatriotic, you know, probably because of all that time spent abroad: she often participates in protests against government policies… policies like cutting down trees - how awful is that?!

My friends, the point I am driving at, is simple. There are many things in this world that should not be defined by others. They should be defined by you. I beg you. I implore you. Please do not go by any yardstick other than your own. Even if a million people believe something, that does not make it automatically true. Live by conscience, live by morals, live by principles; but let it be your conscience and your moral code. Do what you believe is right and don’t go by what society says. That is the key, to living with self-respect, and without regret.

I am a Patriot. I just happen to define it the way my heart tells me.

Thank you.