As my country, India Celebrated its 74th years of Independence, from the imperial rule, I am thankful to all those who fought for our independence and because of whom, I’m able to sit, pen and even share my thoughts…”Freedom of thought, speech and action”, and yet I wondered if we are ever completely free!

Free from:-

• Our Desires
• Our Attachments
• Our Dreams
• Our Aspirations
• Our thoughts
• Our Feelings

( to be happy, to be successful, to be rich, to be important, to be of importance, to be healthy, to look and behave agelessly, to be loved and be in love etc…)

• Our Identities, identified by our name (given or chosen)
• our families and its collective(at times even bordering on rigid) value systems.
• our conditioning’s in keeping with our education both within and outside the educational system.
• our religions and its beliefs.
• our genders and the roles it requires us to play- confine and conform to.
• our ideas of beauty- after all, it’s a $532 billion dollar industry and expected to touch $805 billion marks by 2023.( a collective, impregnated/impregnating thoughts and beliefs, imprinted, impacting and affecting the cultural and financial norms).
• our Nationalities that divides and unites us.
• our finances(bank accounts/investments) which we like to have control over.
• our diets, again which we like control over.
• our positions and our roles both within and outside the family that we identify with; and we can keep extending the list…

and maybe, then absolute freedom is truly scary, for it would entail that we be absolutely and radically be free of any of the above-mentioned conditions. Being the social interactive animals, that we are, it’s even quite difficult for most of us to even with our names, our family names, our gender, our labels as the mother, father, brother, child, employee and employer, our finances just to name the few social basics, and since we all identify with these roles, it invariably becomes almost impossible to be truly and absolutely free. Not just our thoughts and our feelings, we even wish to control our lives, and that makes me wonder “Are we talking of Controlled Freedom or Absolute Radical Freedom when we talk of Freedom?”

Is freedom really attainable or is it like Life, a process, a thought, a belief, an idea, a feeling, in evolution because if we wish to be truly free, like the butterfly, we will have to break open the safety of our cocoons, like the free bird that soars in the skies, be willing to face the heat, the storm, the lightning, the rain and the obvious predators. Are we willing to be that free? or is it a process of slow recovery and discovery?

Vaishali Bobde.