It was a moment of reckoning. In a class of media students at one of the top-ranked colleges in Mumbai, the 19 and 20-year-olds in front of me giggled away about the long weekend and casually asked each other whether August 15 is Independence Day or Republic Day. I stood there, a bit numb, a bit affronted. Did they not care that the undivided nation had suffered greatly at the hands of colonialists, especially the British, and that lakhs of Indians of different persuasions and religions had given so much, including their lives, to free India?

In the next few minutes, it was clear that they cared; they just did not know enough. Without the backstory, or BTS as they say, it was merely a grand holiday or the discount season on consumer goods. What they needed were stories. Stories of the oppression, the political intent crystallised through trade, stories of the heroics of Indians who participated in the mass movements through the 19th and 20th centuries, of men who gave up their vocations, of women who juggled household work with campaigns, and of students who put the cause above all else.

Where did these stories go? Why did they get reduced to a bunch of well-known names and dates? Where did we, the older generations, go amiss that we did not or could not pass on the many narratives of the freedom movement itself, share the passion and the purpose that lit those decades, and hand down the legacy? Importantly, how do we continue to hold on to the stories........

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