I heard a song some days back..A song that talked about ancestoral pride.
I don’t remember being too interested in my ancestry. In fact I never cared to find out much about my lineage for 23 long years and never even realized that it can be a thing to be proud of.
I have met many people innately passionate about their lineage. Like a person I know often mentioned his elite background, he is proud of the fact that just writing his surname in the Google search window gives out his family tree. Good for him. For me, my surname is just a fact, just a 6 letter word I write after my name. I always believed that the only things you can be proud of are the things that belong to you. I remember a dialogue from one of the thousand unfinished stories I wrote, where the guy (supposedly the hero of the story) says that “when people don’t have something of their own to be proud of, they take shelter in their lineage”.
I don’t know what made me write that particular line. But it was something that felt right at the moment.
The closest I remember getting a feel of my ancestry was a few days back, I needed a proof of my permanent residence and my dad faxed the documents of our ancestral home.
Just holding the document in my hand, with the half broken typed letters, and a date that read a few years before my birth made me feel weird and wonderful. It was a strange sensation where I felt that something existed in my family before I did, a suitable revelation to a hopeless egotist like me.
What followed was my search of my roots, thanks to wikipedia and Google, it wasn’t that difficult. I had somehow believed that I would trace my roots back to Gujarat, wikipedia proved me wrong. I don’t know how reliable it was, but somehow what wikipedia suggested made more sense. I traced it all back to a place called “aror” in Sindh. As I read I could visualize the whole place and the incidents that pushed the group of Indo-Aryans right from River Sindhu to Punjab. It was an odd feeling, like reliving the past. I was engrossed in it all, the way I lost myself to the magical stories I heard as a kid, or to Harry Potter in recent past, or to any mushy love story I like.
I don’t know what conclusion I am supposed to draw from my long research. For now, I am back to being a normal person, just a bit enlightened. There’s no feeling of pride as such, what’s left is just a song I have been singing a lot lately, because I can in a way relate to it:
“I can give you the force of my ancestral pride,
The will to go on when I am hurt deep inside
What ever the feeling, whatever the way,
It helps me go on from day to day”
