Patriotism

In my interactions with new friends, colleagues, acquaintances, I have, with increasing incidence, been referred to as a patriot. Since the occasion had never arisen for me to declare my patriotism, I had never spent too much time brooding over the matter. The last half an hour I have spent watching a short documentary on TV, called "Painted Nation". It gives an account of the Indian billboard painter, the fast demise of an industry as it loses out to computer generated images. Most painters will be out of jobs soon, and while India continues to write it's growth story, these painters will be trampled upon and forgotten.
It pulls a chord of pathos within me, and it is a feeling I cannot escape. And it has been something I haven't been able to escape from for as far as I can remember. Be it watching a child trying to sell ear-buds at a traffic signal, poor children singing on the train for a couple of coins, families of impoverished farmers resorting to beggary after a complete loss of self-esteem(imagine the emotion of a man having to watch his wife and children beg for a meal), ...the situations are many and have always involved suffering people. Every time, it has induced a certain amount of grief in me, because these are my people and I cannot turn a blind eye to their plights.
The answers, the solutions to all the problems my countrymen face, I have none. The monetary acts of charity, help an individual or two, but I am not in a position of power to address the issues of the population as a whole. But of the one thing that I am sure, is that I will not desert my country and her people. Many of her sons and daughters have left her shores, in search of a better life in more developed countries. I do not blame them, the choices one makes in life are sometimes personal and no one has the right to question them. But, for me as an individual, I cannot stand from the comfort of a villa in USA, and watch my nation bleed. I cannot take a passive interest in my country and her people. I am driven to attend to her, to alleviate her condition, to try and stop the suicides of her farmers, to try and get her children into schools and not on the streets of metropolitan cities begging for food.
If this implies patriotism, then a staunch patriot I am.