The Home Ministry has decided that all six stanzas of Vande Mataram, the full official version, which runs three minutes and ten seconds, must now be rendered at government functions, flag ceremonies, and civil investitures, and that it must come before Jana Gana Mana. Schools have been “urged” to sing it at morning assembly, which in Indian administrative language means they will.
Read that directive, and you can practically see the room it was written in. Wood panelling. A long table. Not one person under fifty-five. This is a decision made by people whose diaries have gaps in them, for people whose diaries do not. Let me be blunt about the arithmetic, because nobody in that room did it. The national anthem takes fifty-two seconds. The new national song takes one hundred and ninety seconds. We have just quadrupled the ceremonial standing time at every official event in the country. Multiply that by every school assembly, every college convocation, every departmental function, every parade – across 1.4 billion people – and you are looking at one of the largest voluntary donations of national productivity in recent memory. For a country that constantly talks about the demographic dividend and doing more with less, we have found a remarkable way to do less with more.
And here is the part the committee genuinely does not understand: young India is not moved by it. Not because they lack patriotism – that charge is lazy and wrong – but because a slow, solemn, Sanskritised dirge is not how this generation feels anything. They feel things in ninety-second reels, in stadium chants, in a beat that lifts the chest. Ask any twenty-year-old standing in the fourth row of an assembly what they were thinking during stanza five. They were thinking about breakfast.
So here is the alternative, and it is not a rejection of the song – it is a rescue of it.
Commission a new official rendition. Keep the words sacred, change everything else. Make it fast. Make it big. Percussion that starts on the first beat. A tempo you march to, not a tempo you endure. Voices that build rather than drone. And cap it at sixty seconds – one minute, no exceptions, no ceremonial drumroll of seven slow marching paces to warm us up first.
A.R. Rahman proved this in 1997. Maa Tujhe Salaam did more for the emotional life of that phrase in six minutes of radio play than fifty years of harmonium have managed. We know how to do this. We simply did not ask the people who know how.
Reverence is not measured in minutes. A song that thrills you in sixty seconds will be sung willingly for a century. A song that bores you for one hundred and ninety will be endured, resented, and quietly mouthed.
We had a chance to make the national song feel national again. Instead, we made it longer.
Dennis Taraporewala 