Tomorrow is India’s 68th Independence Day.

I have really mixed feeling about India – one on hand, it’s the land of my birth and there’s so much to love there, but the way people are literally destroying the country, makes me very sad. There’s so much potential there, but most people, especially the politicians seem to have made a game of “What can destroy India faster”!

An ancient civilization, which has given so much to the world, Indians are, in my opinion, more inward looking than outward looking. We are so much in love with our past that we tend to brush aside our present and give little or no thought to our future. We get so caught up in little and silly things, that we miss the forest for the trees!

The country is so rich and diverse, both geogrphically and culturally starting with the Himalayas in the north to the Indian Ocean to the south, the deserts of the Thar and the Rann of Kutch in the west to the hilly terrain of the exotic north-east. There are 25 states, 7 Union Territories and is the second most populous country in the world, after China with an estimated population of 1.21 billion who speak more than 1365 rationalised mother tongues with 29 languages having more than a million native speakers each!

India’s cultural history spans over 4,500 years and the foundations of India’s main religion, Hinduism was laid down as between 3500 to 2500 years ago, when most of the western world was probably cavemen! Probably this is why India was the rich bird, ripe for plucking through the ages – from the Persians, Greeks, Mongols, Mughals, to finally the English, Portuguese and the French. A lot of India’s historically rich treasures were plundered and taken away by the conquerors (and never returned till date)

According to the International Monetary Fund (IMF), as of April 2015, the Indian economy is nominally worth US$2.306 trillion; it is the 7th-largest economy by market exchange rates, and is, at US$7.996 trillion, the third-largest by purchasing power parity, or PPP.

All this talk about India has now made me super nostalgic. I remember reading how the last of the British soldiers left India from the shores of the Gateway of India in Bombay, an edifice, which ironically was constructed in 1911 to commemorate the visit of King George V and Queen Mary

Ok, going to stop with this nostalgia with a tune that many of us, especially those who grew up in a certain era will recognize…..Mile Sur Tera Mera….the original plus the new version