Some new national songs please!

I think the whole Vande Mataram smacks of poor timing. With Munnabhai 2 running to packed houses all over India , Bande mein tha dam, Vande Mataram is a cool chartbuster. The movie with no religious ramifications has brought the powerful song back on everyone’s lips. So much for the controversy!

It just makes me wonder if an ordinary person thinks so much before singing a song. In most cases where singing of songs national, devotional or otherwise is enforced, students are usually singing it out of some force. In fact in most schools, the students have to just mime that they are singing and it is usually some old record or a group of chosen singers who are singing on the microphone. Usually the students would be sleepy since this is the first thing they do when they enter school. So from an attention perspective, no student is going to be more than 20-30% involved in this whole exercise.

The only time the attention increases to a crescendo is during Independence Day and Republic Day flag hoisting session where a whole host of national songs are sung from Vande Mataram to Raghupati Raghav Rajaram. Now the latter is more Hinduist than even Vande Mataram but lot of schools do sing it even in non-BJP states like Maharashtra.

In fact if you ask me, the meaning of Vande is a matter of interpretation, it means I bow or I respect and not technically speaking I worship. The problem sometimes is, Muslims believe in the strict interpretation of their religion. Does it mean if they can bow only to Allah, they should not bow to their parents? And I find it strange if some Muslims in their patriotic fervour could have sung the song in the pre-independence era then why not now.

Well the problem is not so much with Islam but petty politics and the lack of issues for the saffron brigade nowadays. Although Vande Mataram is more of an Indian patriotic song rather than a religious, both sides have managed to fuel a nice controversy in the absence of other issues. And the brunt of this would be borne by half interested sleepy eyed students in a school. Why don’t we adopt all chartbusters by Himesh and remix them as national songs, so that everyone can sing it without any problems.

Desh ki Kashish, Sarfarosh hai ….