Padma Shri S. Subbaraman, 96, a retired Superintending Archaeological Chemist with the Archaeological Survey of India (ASI), recalls the exhilaration of August 15, 1947, when he was a 17-year -old Intermediate student in Coimbatore.Now settled in Mysuru, his remarkable ASI career included conservation and restoration work at the Bamiyan Buddhas in Afghanistan, Ajanta Caves, Lepakshi Temple, Angkor Wat in Cambodia and the Brihadeeswara Temple in Thanjavur.

“Yesterday was our 80th Independence Day (counting from that unforgettable day in 1947).

Born in December 1929, I was 17 years and 9 months old on the historic day of August 15, 1947. I was in the II Year Intermediate class at the Government Arts College, Coimbatore and was living with my maternal uncle.

If you ask me how I felt on that day, I would say, ‘It is very difficult to put the feeling into words. The nearest I can come is to say that it felt like a bird, long kept inside a cage, being suddenly set free to fly away into the great expanse.’ I dare say this was how every one of the 40 crore Indians felt on that day.

We all, of course, listened to Jawaharlal Nehru’s ‘Tryst with Destiny’ speech at the midnight hour of August 14/15. If you listen to a recording of that speech today, Nehru’s sing-song delivery may sound quaint, but at that moment, we were all thrilled, particularly by the sentence, ‘When the world sleeps, India awakes to freedom.’

There was no TV then, but the booming voice of Melville de Mello, giving us the 9 o’clock news on All India Radio, was eagerly awaited.

And, of course, there were the newspapers. We read about how deliriously happy crowds literally mobbed Nehru and the Mountbattens in Delhi on August 15. It was a day to forget all worries and rejoice and rejoice.

Of course, it was not all milk and honey. We were painfully aware of what was happening in Punjab and in Noakhali in Bengal, and how Mahatma Gandhi was walking from village to village in Noakhali, trying to douse the violence and  console those affected.

It was a poignant irony that Gandhi, who had led the freedom movement, was not present in Delhi to witness the transfer of power. He was in Calcutta on his peace mission.

Mountbatten hailed him as the ‘one-man army’ that accomplished what the 9,000-strong Border Security Force could not do in Punjab.

It seems to me that we should not only celebrate the gaining of freedom on this day, but also treat it as a day of penitence and contemplation of the national weaknesses that led to the loss of freedom in the first place.

Napoleon mocked the British as a nation of shopkeepers. That a tiny trading island nation should rule a large, faraway country like India for nearly 200 years is indeed a miracle of history. Let us learn our lessons.”