Patriotism means in essence, the love of one’s own country. An individual citizen who loves his country and is loyal to it at all cost, even at the cost of his own life is, a patriot. A patriot is one who is always willing to sacrifice all that belongs to him at the altar of his country. This is the measure of patriot’s extreme love for his country and in common terms it is called patriotism.
Now, the question that arises is, why does a person get so very attached to the country of his birth, the reason is not far to seek. He is born here, nurtured here, blooms into a full fledged lovable youth here and becomes the very soul of the place.
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Thus, it is not surprising that, he should love the country that has given him so much. It is to be expected that an individual loves the country of his birth, just as a person loves his mother who gives him/her birth. Rather, on the contrary it would be shocking to see people without any affection for their country, an individual not caring for his country would sound unnatural strange and even unethical.
India has seen a spate of several patriots in the early decades of the 20th century. When the motherland was writhing in pain under foreign rule, these patriots took birth and helped the country to come out of the wilderness of foreign domination. They sacrificed their lives, their pleasures, their families at the altar of freedom for their motherland from the shackles of foreign rule.
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The list of such patriots is rather long, and, we have to read of their achievements to understand what they went through, and, what patriotism really means. It is these patriots who worked tirelessly for the cause of freeing their motherland from foreign rule. They worked so selflessly and loyally that success could not have avoided their frontiers. It will suffice to remember a few stalwarts of this patriotic hue the list of which starts from Mahatma Gandhi, Jawaharlal Nehru, Subhash Chandra Bose, and the list goes on.
The fruits of their untiring efforts are being enjoyed by the generations to follow. This is the gift of a patriot, he works to his full capacity, and the fruits are enjoyed by the generations to follow. We are all breathing fresh air, living in a free country, and enjoying all kinds of freedoms those patriots never lived to enjoy. Thus, the freedom that we are enjoying today is the gift to us from out patriotic forefathers. Let us always remember them and at least silently pay homage to them.
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With this backdrop let us now consider our own standards of patriotism, these days. We, the present day Indians being the descendants of the patriots who gave us the gift of freedom, are absolutely opposite to them. We Indians of the present generation are willing to sell anything of our country to anyone just for a pittance of money to be used for our own personal benefit. We are found passing on vital secrets, passing wealth to outsiders, just for petty gains for our individual selves. What a contrast to the forefathers who left all that was theirs for the nation.
Also, we are keen on going out of India and settling there just because we get more money there. This is like going to live with our neighbour just because he is richer than our own parents. How absurd it sounds, and how illogical. However, this shows the modern standard of our loyalty to our country that is India. We go out of the country, learn there, earn there, provide all benefits of our knowledge to them, the outsiders, and, never spare time for the growth of our own country.
A striking example I would like to quote here. Our Indian Institutes of Technology spend lakhs of the country’s money on each student that is turned out from these Institutes, and, when the product turns out of the IIT, he at once goes to get settled elsewhere to give the advantage of his knowledge to others, and who cares how far backward his own country India may be. This is not his concern at all.
This drastic change in our attitudes towards patriotism has appeared on the national scene because, we, as individuals have become too selfish, too self centred and individualistic. We never think of helping our own country in its growth and development. If our next door neighbour is rich we never go and stay with him as he is better off than our own parents then, why do we prefer to go and settle anywhere we must only get money more than what our country can afford to give us.
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Our loyalties to our country have faded to such an extent that we do not restrain ourselves from even attacking the coming generations of our country. Our own men are smuggling drugs and selling them outside schools and colleges where our next generations are being nurtured. We are, ourselves helping to make our children into drug addicts, and thus destroy the youth of the country and all this just to become rich ourselves. Is this not a shame, the lowest kind of disloyalty to our motherland.
We, in our desire to earn more and more wealth do not even hesitate in destroying the coming generations – what loyalties were, and what they are, a dismal fact. This degeneration and deprivation has seeped deep into our Indian psyche – we live only for ourselves. The societies, the future of the nation, the nation are of no consequence to us.