 None of what I'm going to, nothing of what I'm going to say is very new, but it needs to be said. And so I welcome this opportunity to speak before you. I thank Pralian for inviting me to be a part of this effort. I just came back from one of our holidays to Calcutta. Calcutta is my birthplace and I go there. We try and go there once a year, once in two years. And I've just come back from spending Christmas there. And there is a bakery in Calcutta called Nahum's. Maybe some of you have heard of it. It's run by a Jewish family, a family of Jews called the Nahum's came to India. They were Baghdadi Jews. They came to India in the 1930s, 1940s I think. And they set up a bakery in the new market, which sells Christmas cakes and a lot of other Jewish specialties. The people who work in this Jewish bakery, the cooks, the bakers, many of the salesmen in the shop, the Dalawalas, the people who carry the bread from the bakery, many, many of them are Muslims. And during Christmas, few days before Christmas, the lines, the queues in front of Nahum's in new market are so long they often double back on themselves, just like those Tirupati queues. That's how long those queues are for those cakes in Nahum's. And the majority of customers who are buying those Christmas cakes are Hindus. So this sort of mixed up, very comfortable jumble of ideas and ideologies and religions and people is what we have grown up with. I'm sure a lot of you have stories like this to share of where we've been completely unable to draw sharp lines that divide us as communities or religions or as people. In the ways in which we lived, in the ways in which we transacted our day to day business, religion was rendered largely irrelevant. It existed in the background, but it didn't dominate or it didn't dominate the conversation or it didn't dominate the ways in which we behaved and interacted. About a decade ago, maybe if you spoke to the man or woman on the street and you asked her to sort of tell you what her problems is or her problems were, chances are all of us would have cribbed everybody on the streets, would have cribbed about politics, they would have cribbed about poverty, they would have cribbed about bad roads, about power cuts. I doubt if anybody 10 years ago would have told you that my major problem is some other religion is making life difficult for me. I completely doubt it. With this idea, this has changed. With relentless sort of hammering and with relentless, you know, propaganda, using the insidious power of the internet, using the insidious power of the smartphone, one party has managed to make a large number of people in this country believe that there is indeed some sort of religious divide in this country which is stopping all other kinds of progress. People to believe, but many of us have ended up believing exactly this propaganda. And that campaign is not some innocent campaign that is, you know, by chance or it's like, you know, it is a focused campaign, it is a planned, strategized campaign. And that campaign peaks with the Citizenship Amendment Act. And it's not going to end there. After that, unless, until and unless, until we reach the point where India has declared a Hindu Rashtra, until the word secular is removed from the preamble in the constitution, this campaign is not going to end. This is the clear objective of this campaign, make no mistake about it. I'm hardly sharing any secret by saying this out on the podium today. This is a well-stated aim of the political dispensation today. This word secular in our preamble in our constitution that we are so proud of and that word that is creating so much trouble today and that isn't so much dispute today. What is this word secular? Is it some sort of an illusion that we, have we been guilty of being too idealistic? Have we thought of, you know, have we imagined this idea of a secular India which doesn't really exist and that, you know, we were pretending it existed? Was there always this kind of conflict? This is a question that well could be asked. But I don't think so. I think we practiced and we believed in and we lived a very realistic idea of secularism. It was messy. It was conflicted. It was confused. It created every six months there used to be some sort of trouble somewhere. There would be religious outbreak, there would be Hindu-Muslim riot, there would be caste riots, there would be Dalit villages would be burned down, there would be intercourse conflicts, there would be trade union conflicts, there would be labor union and student union conflicts. All of this existed, which is fine, which is as it should be. These conflicts broke out. We sorted it out. We went on with life. We didn't say let's dissolve this because this doesn't work. We understood that secularism in such a large country with such a large population with these humongous diversities will be messy. This messy secularism is what made us unique. The understanding that this mess is all right. That we don't have to be what is now so much constantly being thrust upon us. We don't have to be this monotheistic, monolithic, monolinguistic nation. We don't have to be that unrealistic. This pure, un-conflicted India that's going to have one supreme leader and all of us are going to instantly become a developed nation after that. That's not going to happen. Let's make peace with our messiness and let's move on with it. It reminds me of a small story. Suppose one day you went to your friend's house and you complained that there are too many mosquitoes in your house and he said, oh my God, my children are dying of dengue, everyone's in hospital because of malaria. I don't know how to deal with mosquitoes in my house. And then your friend comes by the next day with a can of kerosene and a box of matches and you say, hey, what's going on? And he says, you complained of mosquitoes. Let's burn the house down. You can be damn sure he's not killing the mosquitoes. He's killing you. So we have to understand the difference between solutions, fighting for solutions and this sort of breaking up of everything, setting the country on fire in order to come up with pretence solutions. In our classrooms, once upon a time when we were kids, we used to study something called civics. I don't think that subject exists anymore. It seems to have been merged with a whole bunch of other things. But it was sort of an introduction to political science. And in that class, we used to always have to study the preamble. We had to mug it up and we had to write an answer and you'd get five or 10 marks for it. But in the process of studying the preamble, it was not really just a mugging up exercise. It was very much a part of our lives. The powerful words in the preamble were very much a part of our consciousness. We believed in it. Those words resonated with us. We were in a very, very fundamental way, aware of the strength of our constitution, the strength of our preamble, strength of those words. And we didn't take it lightly. And for me today, the protest across the country against the CAA, for me, one thing has stood out and I'm so happy to see it, is the re-establishment of the preamble in our consciousness. The preamble is being read out in protest after protest. And it's being read out loud and people are owning it. And I think that's what we need to do now. We need to sort of repossess the constitution, repossess the preamble and re-own those words so that we can sort of reclaim the idea of India as we once knew it. And this idea of reclaiming India is very important for me. And it has to be done in various ways. We have to reclaim the country. We have to reclaim the national anthem. It's not just for singing in a cinema hall. We need to reclaim the idea of the national anthem. The reciting of it in public, the singing of it in public. We need to reclaim Hinduism. We are unfamiliar with these ideas of angry gods. We need to reclaim the religion itself. So this battle is going to be fought from a lot of basis. My learned companions in the stage here today are going to talk to you about constitutional and legal angles to this. They're going to explain the CAA and what it means. This battle has to be fought on all of those basis, constitutional, legal, political, and so on. But it has to be fought very importantly from one base, that is the citizen's base. It has to be fought from the heart. The time has come now for us to kind of exit these little cosy, safe middle-class homes that we live in, where we are secure, where we are too posh or too nice or too refined to protest, too refined to hold up a placard or to speak up in public. That time, we don't have the luxury of that anymore. We're going to have to come out into the streets. We're going to have to own this protest. We're going to have to fight this from the heart with passion and with anger. And we need to show it. We need to be out there. And I'm confident that that moment has already been seized upon by many of our compatriots. And we, I think, have only one direction to go from here. And that's ahead. Thank you so much.