Fight or Flight

Ashutosh Varshney On January 20, when Barack Obama is formally inaugurated as president, the US will have a tryst with destiny. As famously defined by Jawaharlal Nehru, a national tryst with destiny is “a moment...when an age ends, and when the soul of a nation, long suppressed, finds utterance”. Scholars of nationalism agree that the US was founded upon an ideology, not ethnicity or race. The ideology was contained in the Declaration of Independence of 1776. “We hold these truths to be self-evident”, it said, “that all men are created equal”. Europe, the Old World, was horribly tied up in feudal hierarchies.The New World would have political and social equality at its core. As a corollary, rising from below became the socalled American dream. In reality, however, the US has not fully lived up to this ideal. Indeed, the creed of political equality came entwined with a founding ambiguity. The founders did not abolish slavery, an institution diametrically opposed to equality. Thi...

November 14, 2008 Long years ago we made a tryst with destiny, and now the time comes when we shall redeem our pledge, not wholly or in full measure, but very substantially. At the stroke of the midnight hour, when the world sleeps, India will awake to life and freedom. A moment comes, which comes but rarely in history, when we step out from the old to the new, when an age ends, and when the soul of a nation, long suppressed, finds utterance.' This is how Nehru, the builder of modern India addressed the nation on the eve of Independence in 1947. Six decades later it is good to look back and see whether these dreams have been on the right track. One cannot help remembering these prophetic words when Chandrayaan I took off on October 22. It is a tribute to Nehru on his birth anniversary today that we pay homage to this great Indian. After centuries of invasions and internal turmoil, the last occupation of undivided India was by the British. It lasted for nearly a century before the n...