After Independence, What?

 A letter to the spirit that raised me,

 

He was born in the early 1920s, in a time when India was still a dream. Before the country had a name of her own, before the flag, before the anthem—he was already in service. My grandfather joined the Army Postal Corps around the time of the Second World War and served through its years and after. His work took him from Kerala to Egypt, Europe, and beyond—as part of a system that moved words across borders, even as nations burned.

He never spoke of war. But his words carried the weight of what he'd seen, and where he'd been.

And perhaps that’s where it began for me—the sense that words carry something sacred. That a message, handwritten or typed, is not just communication, but continuity. A thread across time, between duty and tenderness, between home and the world.

After Independence, he did not retire. He kept serving.

Not out of obedience, but out of quiet alignment with something that didn’t need to be spoken aloud. He belonged to that generation who didn’t shout “Bharat Mata ki Jai!” at every street corner—because they had already offered their lives to her without needing to declare it.

I wonder, often: What did freedom mean to him back then? 

Now, decades later, I sit with a different kind of responsibility. I did not inherit his medals. I inherited his silence. And I’m learning to speak from there.

We will talk about what happened before 1947. But the question that we consider now, at the very beginning of this blog is — After Independence, what?

What do we do with a freedom we didn’t fight for—but now live inside?
What do we protect, when we realize that the outer empire is gone, but the inner forgetting remains?

My answer, for now, is this: I speak. Not to impress. Not to perform. But to remember.

This blog, these reflections—they are my way of delivering a different kind of post. A message across time. From the field where he stood with a letter in hand… To the one where I now stand, with a voice. Now we must swim in the ocean of freedom, now we must let the words rise - that couldn't have been spoken in the dark ages of servitude. - let them rise with care.

Because not all speech is freedom.
Some of it is just noise.
And some, even now, carries the smell of old chains—reshaped, repainted, renamed.

True speech begins when silence has been understood.
And I am still learning what my grandfather knew in his bones:
That the loudest truths are often entrusted to the quietest hands.

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There are many Indias.
The one they dreamed of.
The one we live in.
And the one still waiting to be born.

Between them flows a river of remembrance.
And every word we offer into that river becomes part of its current—pulling us toward or away from what we once vowed to be.

So this is my vow:

That I will not treat freedom as inheritance,
but as inquiry.
That I will speak, yes— 

but only from a place that honors what came before.
And that I will use this space not to forget, but to refine.

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There may be posts here about politics and nationhood.
About startups and language.
About terror, and tenderness.
About audit, and amma.
But underneath each of them flows this undercurrent:

After Independence, what?
The question is not rhetorical.
It is a raga.
It must be sung again and again—until the tune becomes action.

---

May this post be the start of a different kind of delivery.
Not through postbags or stamped envelopes—
But through memory, and vow.

Let it reach whoever needs to remember.
Let it remind whoever needs to rise.
Let it return, when I myself forget.

Because I know now what he knew then:
Some messages are not meant to end.
They are meant to begin again, in another hand.
In another time.
Like this.