Vande Mataram

I recently fell in love with the MTV Unplugged version of our national song. Perhaps it was the different treatment, or maybe it was the slightly rough voice of the female lead singer, or maybe the folk singing that brought it an earthy touch. Or perhaps it was the fact that this was the first time I've been so far from both my family and my country at the same time.
Not that I'm a huge fan of living in India. For years I cribbed and cried how I wanted to get out of there. The dirt, the dust, the pollution, the poverty. And now that I am finally out, there are ofcourse times when I miss the wada pavs (which I never ate while I lived there for fear of food poisoning), the rickshaws (whose drivers' have at many a time demanded rates so high that I would have frequent dreams of committing a multitude of violent acts against them) and even the beggars (the one’s in the US are way scarier) .
But, in spite of all her flaws, she is at the end of the day, our motherland. And as with every mother, we find ourselves annoyed by her constant plea to help her clean up the house, or atleast clean our own room, to work hard and not while away our time playing games and to share our toys with those not as fortunate as us. But ofcourse, stubborn as we are, when we see the house in a mess we run out to avoid cleaning it, we would rather go and live in US or UK than deal with the hygiene issues that plague our country. Its so much easier to earn in Dollars than stay home and work hard for the economic development of India. Share our toys? Sure, we donate to charity, but its no point carrying our kid’s old toys all the way from US to India just to donate, we donate to the poor here in the US, surely they are just as needy right?
It is the sorrow that every mother bears. She raises her children with the hope that they will prosper and have the best that life has to offer, knowing that to truly achieve this they will have to fly away to whichever forest bears the most fruit.