Q.Identify any patriotic song in your language. How is the nation described in this song? Identify and watch any patriotic films in your language. How has nationalism been portrayed and its complexities worked out in these films?

A "nation" is a particular kind of political community — and it is worth being precise about what makes it different from other groups people belong to. A nation is not a family, which is built on face-to-face relationships where every member personally knows every other. It is also not a tribe or clan, where members are linked, even without personal acquaintance, by traceable ties of marriage and descent. Members of a nation, in contrast, will typically never meet most of their fellow nationals, and need not share any provable common descent at all — yet nations exist, are lived in, and are deeply valued by the people who belong to them.

It is a common assumption that a nation must be held together by some single, objective, shared feature — a common descent, a common language, a common religion, or a common ethnicity. In reality, no one such feature is present across all nations everywhere. Canada, for example, has no single common language, since it includes both English- and French-speaking populations; India has a very large number of languages spoken across its regions and communities. The same is true of religion, and of race or descent — none of these can be pointed to as the universal glue that holds every nation together.

Instead, a nation is best understood as an 'imagined' political community — held together not by one fixed objective marker but by the collective beliefs, aspirations and shared imagination of its members, resting on a shared sense of belief, a shared sense of continuing history, an attachment to a common territory, a shared vision of political ideals, and (more contested) a sense of common political identity.