Photo of the day: India's Independence Day

From my favorite Indian newspaper, of course. 

The moment of birth, 63 years ago, was characterized as the "tryst with destiny" by Jawaharlal Nehru.

In that historic speech, Nehru remembered, and reminded everybody, the siblings who now became citizens of another country, Pakistan:

We think also of our brothers and sisters who have been cut off from us by political boundaries and who unhappily cannot share at present in the freedom that has come. They are of us and will remain of us whatever may happen, and we shall be sharers in their good and ill fortune alike.

For India and Pakistan, it has been two very different tales right from their births.  I often wonder what the story might have been had there been no partition.  Or, what if Kashmir had become a separate country, like Nepal. And, later on, what if the states had not been created based on the prevailing majority languages spoken.

Such counterfactual questions aside, it is quite an achievement, indeed, that the country has been largely successful with its experiment in democracy--except for that brief period of darkness that was the "Emergency" imposed by the then prime minister, Indira Gandhi.

I have my own version of Salman Rushdie's marking of the I-Day in his life; it was on a August 15th that I left India for the United States decades ago in order to pursue graduate studies at USC.  It is also, in a way, my own independence day :)