#VandeMataram It is easily the most beautiful ode to the motherland . It is a nice song written in the traditional Hindu style of a prayer. The preponderance of Sanskrit words make it a bit difficult to pronounce for the present generations of confused Indians being churned out of the career building factories aka schools. Set to the tunes by A R Rahman , it became very popular as a nationalist chant and he , along with Bharat Bala deserve credit for this. I personally believe those who say that they won't sing this song for their religious affiliations are stupids. And those who say that this song must be sung by everybody to serve as a litmus test of patriotism are idiots.
But more than that I wonder how many people have ever read the lyrics of the Vande Mataram song beyond the first two words. And of those how many understand the meaning of each word and line of the song . Further, knowing how many can sing the whole song will be very illuminating. But even if one has these doubts , I suppose it will be dangerous to express them in this atmosphere of blind and irrational hype about it. So let me save my skin first.
Those lovely ones who love to question me back may please note that I read the whole song at the age of twelve as a part of the novel Anandamath , in Bengali . And since I know Bengali well and also studied Sanskrit upto twelfth , I understood each word of it. And believe it or not, once upon a time I also memorised it fully. Now I don't remember the lines .
And please, please, please believe me when I say that both Anandamath and Vande Mataram were penned in Bengali by the Bengali writer Bankim chandra Chattopadhyay in 1882 , not by Shri Deen Dayal Upadhyay or some other great man in our so called Rashtra Bhasha to drive the British away in 1947.
Let's keep it on record . In this era of post truth , you never know who will appropriate what and associate with whom.
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