Independence Day

July 4^th, surely.  That’s the most famous one, the one referenced in the movie of the same name.  But not, of course, the one referenced by this post.  August 15^th.  The biggest Independence Day in the world, celebrated by the biggest country in the world, (in the biggest school in the world, etc.)  They aren’t very similar at all, actually, apart from the name.  Except, of course, in one huge respect: that both mark independence from the same small country:  Britain.  Of which I seem to be very nearly the only representative at CMS.  Except for the elusive Dawn, whom everyone tells me I must meet.  (“She’s one of us now,” I was told by one of the senior teachers, or principals, what seems like a lifetime ago, when I first arrived.)  Except she seems to flee back to England for six months every year, which period apparently covers all of my stay here.  She lives in Oxfordshire, apparently , so in theory she could be a short stroll away from our house in Little Ickford.  I digress.

I do, of course, make comic capital out of the fact that I am a Britisher here during Independence Day.  But then I make comic capital out of everything I can.  Yesterday, for example, it led to a mass debate (careful) with me taking on the entire cast, part apologising for the mess we’d made when leaving (let alone the mess we made when arriving), part criticising them for the mess they’d made if independence – not, as I pointed out, India’s finest period.

But why are these Independence Days both about liberation from us.  I think they have them in Malaysia, too; Kenya, Canada, Australia.  I suppose we must have been the only imperial nation ever to give the countries back to their people voluntarily.  Not without a good deal of kicking and screaming, obviously – Mau Mau, all he other shameful examples – but eventually we did seem to come to our senses, made some rudimentary arrangements, and had a  big ceremony on one particular day.  Independence Day.  All very civilised, in its own way.  While all the other empires  – Mongol, Roman, Spanish, etc, seemed to collapse under their own weight, or were defeated by other people wanting to have empires of their own.

In India, it seems to take the form of holidays like Hallowe’en, as a huge marketing opportunity, the chance to shift a mountain of tat.  There are flags, bunting, whatever on sale everywhere – every roadside stall apparently abandoning whatever it was they sold before – a sea of green, white and orange.  Gates, roundabouts, shops all festooned with the stuff, alongside – like Christmas in the west – so many LED lights that it must put a strain on an already creaking national power supply; must, indeed, be visible from space.

I happened to be at the biggest CMS campus of them all, Kanpur Road, there to deliver the first part of a workshop on Julius Caesar, and happened to witness the celebration being put on for the smallest students – hundreds of them, all decked out in special ID hats, with little ID flags to wave.  It was quite the spectacle.  Utterly deafening too, of course – they always turn the volume up to 11 at any excuse,  (What they are going to make of a microphone-less Aesop I have no idea.)

It was the Principal who welcomed me in, and right down to the front, when you might have thought I would be absolutely the last person they would want to see, some sort of latter-day Louis Mountbatten.  I made a joke along the same sort of lines to Principal ma’am, but I don’t think she got it.  (Nothing new there then.)

While on the same sort of subject – small children and jokes – they have a charming custom here of children who happen to be celebrating their birthdays (another sort of Independence Day, when you think about it) bring sweets which they distribute to their friends and teachers.  Except it goes a bit further than that, and they are allowed to wear their own fancy clothes, and to take a tray of sweets around the school.  Except this being such an enormous school, there are an enormous number of children sharing a birthday, and they troop around the school in a number of  groups of about ten each.

Whenever I encounter one of these groups, I always pounce, not so much because of the sweets, which frankly I can take or leave, but as an opportunity to wish each one a happy birthday and make contact – if you can’t have a mad Englishman harass you on your birthday, when can you.  It nearly backfired today, when one small girl with a tray of larger, more expensive – and consequently rather  fewer sweets – was most alarmed when it seemed she was going to have to give one of them up to a complete stranger.  I teased her briefly, but ultimately relented; I didn’t want to risk making her cry.

But I do have a lot of the toffees, chocolates, mini-Kit Kats.  Mostly I just put them in a bowl on the apartment coffee table.  But then I ate one, and only then noticed its remarkably apposite name.