Pride in being Indian?

Being Indian.

There is vagueness, a bit of confusion.

I thought I wasn’t ashamed of it – of being an Indian, but was there pride? If yes, about what? History? Of what we have achieved in the past 20 odd years that I have witnessed and remember of? 

I don’t know an answer to that.
 

So I thought, let’s think about pride and what it means to most of us.

I realized eventually that to have an answer to this confusion, one needs to decide on what is actually meant when one says “Indian” or “Being Indian”.
 

I came to the conclusion that we confuse 'Ethnicity Indian' with 'Citizen Indian' at most times. This eventually leads to our idea of nationalism which in turn leads to patriotism and all the like.
Ethnicity adds a new dimension. With ethnicity, there is suddenly a few thousand years old history and culture. Are we all proud of that? Aren’t we all taught to be proud of that?

And I came up with something that I thought made sense. (of course! I would support my theory anyway.) 

If a friend does something really cool, you say, “I’m proud of you”. It does not mean that, “hey, you did this! I wish I’d done the same and so I’m proud of you.” You have to do something (in this case, make a decision and befriend someone) to be able to take pride in something. With your ethnicity/culture, you haven’t done anything – unless you are someone who changed the course of your race. You were just born there, which as much as you’d hate to say it aloud, was a matter of chance and nothing more. So rationally you have no right to be proud of it.That leaves us with Indian – the citizen.
You can take a call on that!

And while pondering over the subject, see what I found from an article by Khushwant Singh. He answers the exact same question. In his usual candid way!

“Why am I an Indian? I did not have any choice: I was born one. If the good Lord had consulted me on the subject I might have chosen a country more affluent, less crowded, less censorious in matters of food and drink, unconcerned with personal equations and free of religious bigotry. Am I proud of being an Indian? I can’t really answer this one. I can scarcely take credit for the achievements of my forefathers. And I have little to be proud of what we are doing today. On balance, I would say, ‘No, I am not proud of being an Indian.’”