A spiritual angle to the Republic Day

You spend 9 months in your mother’s womb in privacy. The day you are born you become public. By the time you are 3 years old, you start getting enveloped in a sense of individuality and becoming a private person. You limit yourself with your likes and dislikes, draw boundaries between mine and others, start making a distinction of personal and public, and cling on to some identities. Most people live like that all their lives, in a dual world – one private and one public. You are something inside and something else on the outside.

When your outlook towards life broadens, you become like an open book. That is to say that your inner and outer worlds merge. When the distinction between me and others disappears, it is then that you become public. You have a sense of belonging with everyone and share all that you have. You have really become like a child again and that is when you have become re-public.

In a spiritual sense, Republic Day is an individual phenomenon, the ultimate blossoming.