[Points: What it is—our indebtedness to the land of birth—bound up with many other good qualities—natural to man should not lead to hatred of other people.]
Patriotism is love of one's own country. It is one of the finest and noblest sentiments of the human heart. We can never be too grateful to the land where we were born. We get our food and drink from her. She supplies us with families, friends and acquaintances in order that we may live a civilised social life. Our education and culture also take their direction and form from her history. In short, everything we enjoy in life, everything that makes human existence superior to all other existences, we owe to the land of our birth. This is why she is everywhere likened to the mother and is called the mother land or mother-country. "The mother and the motherland are superior even to Heaven", so runs a Sanskrit proverb, and there can not be a truer saying than this. In fact, the people of every civilised country are passionately devoted to their mother-country and consider it an honour and a privilege if they can sacrifice their lives for her sake. The feeling of patriotism is bound up with some other noble qualities of the heart like charity, fellow-feeling, philanthropy. When we hear of any distress anywhere in the country, such as flood, famine, earthquake, we come forward with offers of help. The rich found schools, colleges, hospitals, etc., for their suffering fellow-countrymen. Patriotism inspired some of the finest poems in the world, like Scott's "Breathes there the man etc.", Campbell's "Ye mariners of England etc.", and many songs of D. L. Roy, Rabindranath Tagore, etc., of Bengal.
This love of country is almost natural to every man. We may not be conscious of it in normal times; but we feel it when the call of the country reaches our ears. The latest proofs of this were furnished by our country during the Chinese attack in 1962 and the Indo Pak conflict in 1965. The eagerness with which every man living in a foreign land hankers after the society of a fellow-countrymen is also another proof of this instinctive patriotism of mankind.
But love for our own country should not make us think ill of foreigners. Unfortunately, however, there is a tendency among the people of the world to advance the cause of their countries at the cost of others. This is responsible for so much bloodshed and trouble in the present-day world. Indeed, the evil has developed so much that some thinkers have begun to think regarding nationalism as an evil and preaching internationalism. But it is not fair to denounce a thing which is really noble simply because of its abuse or misuse.
