For 71 years and counting, a little café in south Goa has been celebrating India's freedom from British rule, even during its decades as part of a Portuguese colony, marking each anniversary with buntings, sweets and conversations on the legacy of the past and hopes for the future. And so it was yesterday too, when Bharat Café, in a charming Portuguese era building in Old Margao Market, got all dressed up for Independence Day.'

On August 15, 1947, when the bells tolled India's freedom from the British, Subraya Sheshagiri Shetti rang in freedom in the café he had started 12 years earlier in 1935. Seven decades later, on Independence Day yesterday, Shetti's grandson Deepak Ananth Shetti continued the tradition set by his Gandhian grandfather in the cafe, which boasts a bust of Mahatma Gandhi.