Virtual Bharat – India’s 77th Independence Day
September 4, 2024
Dear members of Indiaspora,
It gives me great pleasure to write to you on the occasion of India’s 77th Independence Day. As hyphenated Indians, children of a distant motherland, you are intimately familiar with the question of what it means to be Indian. On supermarket shelves and at dance recitals, in yoga workshops and at community meetings, between branding, labels and hybrid identities, you are confronted with a simple, yet profound quandary: What really is Indian?
That thought is inextricably linked to a much bigger concept: What is India? Beyond country, culture and cuisine, it represents an idea, an emotion, an intangible draw, a sublime call of the spirit.
Over the past decades, I have traveled the length and breadth of this magnificent country, seeking out the answer in every nook and cranny, trying to capture the essence of India and Indianness in the hum of its daily rhythms, in lived-in landscapes great and small.
On some days, I find it in the roaring Ganga gushing over a Himalayan cliff. On some days, I find it in the breathless pants of a Senior Railways official chasing Gandhi barefoot on the streets of Chennai. It is in the folded palms of Sait Bai, every inch of her skin etched with her devotion, her penance. It is in the undulating pitch of a nomadic song serenading a crackling fire.
At Virtual Bharat, where we are on a 1000-film journey across this 5000-year-old civilization, I see my idea of India reborn every day, as we unravel little known facets of its art, culture, architecture, music, poetry, folklore and tradition through uncommon stories of the common man and woman. Our quintessential aam aadmi.
For it is in the extraordinary personal journeys of “ordinary” people that we see the idea of India at its finest, its civilizational wisdom distilled into something tangible, a story where emotion, sound and vivid visuals collide to yield an unforgettable experience.
In that spirit, I want to leave you with our Virtual Jana Gana Mana, our project with Google, where the nation came together to sing in one voice. From the dawn lit mountains of Arunachal Pradesh to the golden shores of Tamil Nadu, here is India, singing as one.
