15th August- Just a long weekend!

My g-talk and Facebook is now full of people with status akin to ‘can’t wait for the long weekend’. There is euphoria all around. 15th of August is a Friday, which clubbed with the weekend makes a sumptuous treat for the sleep deprived, overworked tribe of people all around me!
Marketers are busy tying up the loose ends of the campaigns they would run in sync with the patriotic frenzy and there are free-bees floating all around the retail space. I wonder if people jump to grab those deals because they are commemorating their freedom from the British Raj or is it just because the deals are lucrative! I suspect the latter to be true but I am happy to see the tricolor adorning those advertisements nevertheless.
The entire rigmarole is leaving me confused. Professionals and businessmen who can extract some value out of an event like Independence Day are busy doing that. People who have no event centric activity to focus on are planning week-end get-aways or dreaming about three days of pure laze. Who the hell is euphoric about the fact that our ancestors liberated themselves and the coming generations from two-hundred years of oppression, bondage and an insensitive foreign rule? Who amongst us pauses to think the amount of obsession, guts, blood and passion it took to drive out an alien administration that was strong enough to flaunt the slogan ‘the sun never sets…’?
We complain that there is nothing to celebrate about because even after sixty plus years of independence X percentage of Indians are still below poverty line and Y percentage of children die out of malnutrition every year. We complain about everything right from pot-holes to the stinking drains that overflow, to power crisis to the state of education to corruption to everything that ought not to be the way it is.
If August the 15th is significant only because it offers one a long weekend, it is not one’s right to complain about the state of affairs anyway.
May be we need to be reminded the age old quote, done to death in elocution competitions when we were kids and were probably more sensible- think not what the nation has done for you, think what you have done for the nation.