The Patriot!

They call it love for the motherland. But love that never leaves the lips is not love, it’s theatre.

Every year, they raise the flag as if it were a holy relic, then lower their eyes when the ground beneath it drowns in filth. They sing the anthem with the breath of priests, then spit betel-red confessions on the same walls that carry her name. They call her Bharat Mata, yet bind her rivers with plastic garlands, as if the gods have begun to eat from the dustbin.

I watch them from the corner of a street...the so-called "guardians of the nation", roaring on social media when an external threat knocks, but never thinking twice before urinating on a public wall. Women who light lamps to the Ganga, then send her their household garbage wrapped in polythene next morning. Drivers who drape the tricolour on their dashboards, then run red lights and drink through the night before gripping the wheel. Citizens who boast of our diversity to foreign guests, but sharpen their tongues and fists against their own neighbours.

Love for the land has become a costume, it lives in Facebook posts, in WhatsApp statuses, in parades once a year where the drums are louder than the conscience.

After the show, the masks come off, and the land remembers. The soil is patient. It does not revolt when we neglect it. It does not scream when we poison it.

It simply grows silent.....and in that silence, it begins to forget us.

One day, there will be no enemies at the gate, only weeds in the fields, rust in the rails, and rivers too ashamed to return to the sea.

For a nation does not fall in a war, it falls in the slow decay of its own children’s apathy.

And here’s the truth we keep running from, a nation is not a piece of land with a flag stuck in it. It is the sum of the people who breathe within it, a living consciousness stitched from millions of small choices. It exists because we believe it into existence....because we give it a face, a voice, a soul.

A nation isn't a piece of land.....

A nation is a group of people who believes in the idea of a nation.....

We are not merely in the nation....

We are the nation....

Scattered pieces, forming one image.

And when we dream of change,

It cannot be painted on walls or printed on banners.

It must begin in the mirror!