Stumbling upon an Independence struggle

Had some time to kill between half day of work and a Saturday night party at a friends place. Didn’t want to go home so I headed over to Nehru planetarium (one of the places in Mumbai where you can literally get star struck and not by the Bollywood kind!) They were showing, ‘Hide and seek in the sky’, but unfortunately the show was sold out, it being a Saturday, when some school or the other decides to herd their kids off to such ‘picnic cum educational’ tours. This left me with an option to head to a nearby mall to window shop or generally roam about. So I choose the later. I wandered off towards the exhibition area of Nehru centre. Dissapointment again, found out that the exhibition was about educational institutions. Having no inclination to venture there I had a plate of samosa at the ‘very ok’ canteen in Nehru centre and thought of what to do next. My eyes drifted to the upstairs’ balcony where I saw rows of shelf like cupboards with exhibits of all shapes and sizes. So I headed up. On reaching the landing I found myself face to face with the exhibit on the Indian Independence struggle and something drew me in.

I am not going to bore you with the details of what I saw in there, but it was like revisiting our history text books, with pictures and recreations of major events, famous leaders, fake jail cells recreated to resemble the size and facilities of the jail cells the freedom fighters spent a majority of their time in, etc. But what struck me was this quote by Gopal Krishna Gokhale put up in one of the exhibits, it goes something like this, “We, the present generation of India, can only hope to serve our country by our failures. The men and women who will be privileged to serve her by their successes will come later.” It was amazing to imagine the vision of these people. They could foresee a future worth working towards and dedicated their lives to it. It’s up to us the men and women of the ‘today’ to live up to their dreams.

Ni.