To sing or not to sing when the nation is croaking

Fantastic, now Syed Shah Geelani of the separatist Jammu Kashmir Hurriyat Conference wants all Kashmiris to stop singing Jana Gana Mana and also boycott functions where the anthem is played.
This was bound to happen. When half of India is deciding whether we should sing Vande Mataram or not, someone was bound to get a little more adventurous and demand that his kin and clan not sing the national anthem.
However I see nothing wrong with it. It reminds me of an incident that happened in my native Jamshedpur almost two decades back. While we kids couldn’t understand what much of the fuss was all about, the Malayali community there was gripped by the debate and at most of the times found themselves arrayed against the other communities in the Steel City.

The immediate provocation was that one of Jamshedpur’s most loved doctors, especially among the Malayalis there, suddenly decided that sending his three school going children to school on Republic Day or Independence Day would fall a bit foul of his religion.

The school, which made it a strict practice that no student could miss the two red-letter days, promptly started the procedure to expel the three students.
If you are surmising that this gentleman was a Muslim, think again. He was a Jehovah’s Witness, a little known but staunch group of people, predominantly Malayalis.
Now the tenets of their religion forbid the break-up of humanity into religions, countries, anthems, flags and so on a so forth. It is a community that puts a lot of emphasis on education and the power of God to set things right. And despite this gentleman being a fabulous doctor himself, he respected the wishes of his family members when they refused to take any medical help for even serious ailments. Visiting a doctor is a sin according to staunch Jehovah’s Witnesses and the logic is that if an ailment is the handiwork of God, then we have no business going to a earthly mortal for relief.
This doctor, a wonderful human being who was respected by all and sundry in Telco township where I grew up, soon found himself in the eye of a storm in a place dominated by Biharis who thought singing the national anthem was one of the fundamental pillars of showing your patriotism. The fact that dowry deaths, female infanticide, illiteracy and discrimination between girls and boys were rampant among them made no difference to them.
However a judgment by the Supreme Court around that time in the famous Biju Emmanuel versus Union of India case- wherein the apex court said not singing the national anthem or not being present for such functions is no crime- came to the help of the doctor. A few weeks later the dust settled down and everything was back to normal, the doctor’s reputation and respect among his legion of patients intact. The doctor continued dispensing his medicines with a smile and some jokes that lost much of their colour when translated from Malayalam to Hindi.
The point here is that singing or not singing the national anthem does not make us lesser Indians or unpatriotic ones.
If some people believe the national anthem isn’t robust enough or that it was actually written by Tagore for a British king, then those are viewpoints we should respect and move on.
Just think about it. We have hundreds of politicians who swear by the Indian Constitution and then create Swiss bank accounts running into billions of dollars even from impoverished lands like Jharkhand.
We have thousands of lawyers who swear to uphold the law of the land and then behave like minions of gangsters and frauds.
We have lakhs of doctors who take the Hippocratic Oath and then cut out a kidney when the poor chap isn’t looking.
We have hundreds of witnesses in court who swear on the holy books to speak the truth and then speaking anything but that.
So what difference does it make whether someone wants to sing the national anthem or not.
Most of us are horrible Indians anyway, singing or not singing a song for just under a minute will not make much of a difference. Or if you don’t want to sing it, standing for it wouldn’t hurt either.