As I celebrate Diwali today, I often reflect on my life and what it means to have been born an Indian. Since this a blog about India and life in my homeland, I had better begin with justifying why I started this Blog.

Foremost is my dedication to my country. It began in the earliest years of my life. Each morning at our school, we opened the day with the recitation of the National Pledge

India is my country and all Indians are my brothers and sisters.
I love my country and I am proud of its rich and varied heritage.
I shall always strive to be worthy of it.
I shall give respect to my parents, teachers and elders and treat everyone with courtesy.
To my country and my people, I pledge my devotion.
In their well being and prosperity alone lies my happiness.
Jai Hind!

Each time I recited these words in my usual off-key voice, I was convinced that a universal brotherhood did exist in my cherished land of Bharat.I have often thought back on that simpler time and concluded that it is better for a child to have some strong social and moral beliefs rather than none at all,even though his early doctrination may have been chauvinistic, muddled or even erroneous. He can always correct errors, but if he has allegiance to nothing, he has nothing to work on in his later re-education.

At an early age I began to know our country well. I travelled extensively throughout India and from these travels I acquired an appreciation of the fact that we are a country with unique blessings and unique curses. Our land frontiers have been encroached upon from time to time throughout our long and tortuous history. We have not had mastery of the seas that surround us and to this day we are surrounded by hostile nations and the only way to guarantee our hard fought freedom seems to be by constantly engaging in a state of proxy war with our enemies both external and internal.

Within our boundaries we have rich agricultural land capable of providing for our people. We also have spectacular natural beauty:our towering mountains,our vital rivers We are a land truly blessed and beneath this beauty lie substantial deposits of coal, iron,manganese important for rapid industrial development.

As I matured from boyhood to manhood I watched with rising indignation the erosion of democracy and nationalist sentiment. I watched the callous and corrupt policies of mongering politicians and the nexus between labor union leaders, capitalists and political bosses and the dirty tricks by which the lower castes ,backward classes and religious minorities continued to be ruthlessly exploited in the name of secularism and socialism. But despite this early indoctrination into the uglier aspects of our political world, I was never attracted by the Communism and socialist then rampant on college campuses. It was obvious enough to see that whereas some of its social principles were identical with some of mine, its eceonomical principals and its ideologies had minimal chances of success. My earlier conclusions on such matters never wavered and my rejection of state sponsored Socialism became total.

I immersed myself in studying the history and culture of our people and gained an insight into what made India and Indians tick. I learned to admire the common man,the unknown Indian who labored from dawn to dusk to improve his life and that of his family , and succeed in small measure, not because of, but inspite of ,bad government and rampant corruption that has become the norm in our nation.

From the varied experiences I had and the knowledge I gained of our history and our culture I had just cause for believing that our land was indeed a cherished and noble land, a conviction from which I never retreated.

I am now halfway through this magnificent adventure called Life and the time has come for me to assess what I can do in tangible terms for the upliftment of our great nation. It is from such a background that I start this blog.

JAI HIND!