One of my all time favorite movies is Hero directed by Zhang Yimou. The cinematography is breathtaking and it has all the action that would appeal to lovers of martial arts. However I like this movie for its political message and what it really means to be a hero. The Hero does not achieve his immediate aim of assassination as he believes that the Emperor would lead China and the Chinese people to a much better future. Now China is a large country with a population larger than India’s. It benefits greatly from the one language and one culture that unifies Chinese people all over the world. I have some close Chinese friends at school and find that the Chinese expat community in most places is more cohesive than the Indian community. When I look back at my NMSU days and remember the cliques that were formed along regional lines I realise how much India has lost by not having one language and one culture. India had an opportunity after independence to rectify this. If only we had adopted Maulana Azad’s proposal of replacing the urdu and devnagiri scripts with the roman script a national language would have had a better chance of adoption in South India. But our opportunistic politicians decided to divide up India into states based on language and today we are a potpourri of different people without any common identity.