EVEN as we are braced up to celebrate 75 years of India’s Independence, it is time for us to consider how comprehensively we can launch efforts to spread awareness about how we attained freedom from foreign rule. This story of how India gained freedom, therefore, needs to be told again to our youngsters -- so that they learn to become better citizens in time to come.

 

Let us start telling stories of India’s independence struggle to our kids. And dinner-time is the best slot for us to achieve that goal. This issue has come up in ‘Loud Thinking’ time and again. Yet, the loud-thinker does not mind raising it one more time -- or many more times. For, he understands the importance both the factors -- story-telling, and dinner-time. In fact, in all cultures -- across the globe -- dinner-time has had a special significance all along. Families have often used dinner-time for cementing familial ties and forging a harmonious unit of the society. Parents and grandparents have often used dinner-time to communicate to the youngsters in the family the importance of values and virtue and togetherness. Even in nuclear family set-up of today, the same practice needs to be continued so that better family bonding is achieved -- which is becoming increasingly difficult in the mobile telephony era -- when everybody is busy with his or her own gadget of differing levels of ‘smartness.’

 

Despite this, it is worthwhile to try to restore the institution of traditional family dinner and use the time to build a stronger bond among the members of the family. As India recalls its heroes of Independence struggle, the families would do well to have elders (of whatever age) to tell the stories of heroism of faceless people who fought against the British and made it impossible for them to run the country. The elders in the family -- father, mother, uncle, aunt, grandparents -- must collect details of small or big episodes of freedom struggle and tell those to youngsters. Even the youngsters can be encouraged to read such stories from their books and share those with the family at dinner-time. To some this may look like an irksome activity. But when stories are told at dinner-time, at the table or while squatting on the floor, they offer a delicious experience to the story-teller and the listener.

 

Actually, each one of us knows this fact, but somehow the dinner-time togetherness has become a rarefied activity of late. That is a sorry state of affairs, though. Yet, we must revive that activity so that we get a chance to share with one another the story of how India got Independence. When we are all together, when our mobile phones are kept away, when we have nothing to distract our attention, we become better candidates to join story-telling as a collective activity -- during which we can talk of heroes of our struggle that brought Independence to us.