Indira, Jeeps and Blue Books(Thanks to my dear old friend VK Kanna for this link)
June 25th 1975 … The Emergency !
I still remember the day …
I was a 2nd year B.Com undergraduate student in Loyola College , Chennai, who having finished the First Year university examination was enjoying the ensuing holidays until the new academic year commenced for the 2nd year …
On the morning of that fateful day , I got off the public transport bus at Sterling Road junction and began walking down to the college gates …
An eerie surreal silence had descended on the world …
The college gates and campus usually teeming and buzzing with the raucous , rowdy noise of swaggering students — yells, guffaws, whistles, honks, and boos—was strangely deserted and so funereally quiet … No more than a handful of souls going about …
The nations’s voice had just been silenced the midnight before by a black, draconian ordinance of the government .. And the whole of the Loyola college campus seemed to me that morning to be cringing , and echoing very meekly, very obediently and dutifully that reverberating national silence …
I confess that on that day , never did I imagine that India would ever at all emerge out of the Emergency as a free country again. I thought I would be destined eventually to graduate from college and enter into an absolutely totalitarian state the foundations for which Indira Gandhi had just lain and set so swiftly and brutally …
Thankfully , History took a different uniquely different turn …
And upon graduating out of college later in 1977 and when I too joined the ranks of millions of unemployed in the country, I saw India was free and joyous again… and as usual … became the roiling “functioning anarchical” circus that it had always been the way I had always known my country to be .
I was a very young man then .. 46 long years ago! I was just stepping out from academia to make something of my life in the brave new world I was about to enter . A page in a chapter in Indian history I’d feared would never be turned … had been been marked in bloody red ink as a black day … and the nation was about to move on ..
I look back 46 years ago when I was just 19….and I say to myself now: “Ah! How wonderful indeed it is to keep smelling the same rotten-sweet, but delightfully refreshing fragrance of so many unfettered, tumultuous human freedoms Mother India has gifted me and that have kept me blessed and well nourished all these years … the same freedoms that my children too can breathe today!
Maa, tujhe salaam! Mera Bhararat mahaan!
🙏👏👏🙏
Sudarshan
June 25, 2021