Farewell to a dream of freedom that once was AmericaChristopher Columbus ‘discovered’ America in 1492, and believed he’d reached India. Bunny and I madeour discovery of America in 1976, when US was celebrating its 200th anniversary of independence.In lieu of first-hand accounts on Bicentennial America, I got three months’ paid leave from JS magazine where I worked. This and our savings bankrolled our trip along with the kindness of family, friends, and strangers.Though Hollywood had given us a teaser trailer of that mythical land of Stars and Stripes, it had not prepared us for the overwhelming reality of America.Manhattan’s towers of stone and glass were rocket ships poised to pierce the blue infinity of sky. Supermarkets, seemingly the size of several football fields, were crammed with food enough to feed the population of a medium-size country for a year. A dairy chain boasted 32 flavours of ice cream. The blazing lights of Las Vegas turned desert night into dazzling day.Coming from an India of socialist shortages where austerity was a patriotic duty, symbolised by rituals like Miss-a-Meal Day, when citizens were exhorted to skip lunch or dinner once a week to ensure the country’s food security, America’s opulence overcame us.The plenitude of America was not just material. Smell the air, it’s the air of freedom, said Bunny. And it was. You breathed a sense of openness. Not just the openness of vast vistas linked by sweeping highways, but an openness within, a sense that you were in a place called freedom, where you could be what you wanted to be, go where you wanted to go, achieve what you wanted to achieve. That was the American dream.We didn’t want to live permanently in that dream, but we visited it several times, grateful for its being there.That dream of freedom, born of a hard-won pledge taken 250 years ago, has vanished as though it never were, swept away by an ICE-age of paranoia, bigotry, and xenophobia imprisoning the American spirit.Had he been around today, Columbus might have given his discovery a miss. Along with Bunny and me, that makes three of us.
Disclaimer: Views expressed above are the author’s own.