Slaving in my office on Independence Day got me thinking. You know it's illegal to work on a national holiday but such is my commitment towards my project that I would go to jail for it. That is beside the point of this article. (Come to think of it I don't have a point to make in this article as yet. Maybe I'll get one by the time I finish.)

To many of us Independence Day is just a holiday. We totally appreciate the holiday especially if it falls in the middle of the week. We appreciate it more if it falls on a Friday. Apart from that we feel no special patriotic zeal. It's probably been killed spending Independence Day mornings watching the Independence Day celebrations telecast by Doordarshan during our tender, impressionable years. The speeches of the various honorable Prime Ministers only invoke a feeling of absolute apathy. They have been painfully boring and the programming before those speeches consists of shots of the route from the PM’s residence to the Red Fort. After the speech, if I remember correctly, is the display of god-awful-looking floats or schools kids doing some Indian folk dance routines. All this accompanied by a deadpan voiceover. Somebody drew up that schedule in the dark ages and like all Government organizations Doordarshan still follows it.

Our generation is criticized for being unpatriotic, forgetting our roots and aping the West. Now whose fault is that? The youth of today is entertained on a staple of cable television. We are easily bored and will not stand for tripe and so if the nation's keepers want us to tune into the country they need to really rework that programming for a start.

Yesterday morning though I skipped the speech et al, I saw this 'patriotic advertisement' if there is such a thing. It had Kiran Bedi dressed as a beggar woman foraging in a garbage bin. She finds the Indian flag with a hole in it. (Please note this flash of brilliance - only the flag is resplendent in tri-colour while Kiran and the garbage dump, etc., are in black and white.) Kiran goes to a shop, buys needle and thread, tears a bit from her ragged sari and patches the hole in the flag. That's as much of the piece as I saw. Oh! It also had music maestro Illayaraja droning on a sad-sounding song in the background. Compare that with A. R. Rahman's Maa Tujhe Salaam with its slick visuals and a fabulous soundtrack. But A. R. Rahman’s patriotic appeal happens only once in 50 years!

How can anyone expect the youth of today to identify with or appreciate Kiran's touching patriotism? We are people born way after the "stroke of the midnight hour." Our nation is only 54 years old and the youth is already bored with the celebrations. The Americans celebrate the fourth of July with great enthusiasm even after 200 odd years of independence. We just need it to be packaged differently and communicated to us in our language.

My appeal to the media is to please make Independence Day cooler and let us celebrate our nation.