By Valson Thampu
In one view, all human enterprises are born aborted. There are mortal wounds on our foreheads, even as we march to the battlefield. Wisdom says, “Vanity of all vanities; all is vanity.” Whether this is modern cynicism or historical realism you will have to decide for yourself.
Today we celebrate our Republican status with pomp and power. The nation’s might is on display. How does it connect to the India of our dreams?
The President and the Prime Minister have spoken. We are grateful. Communication is so important in democracy and public life in all of its facets. But communication, as the meaning of the word insists, has to be a two-way process.
In theatre there is a clear difference between dialogue and soliloquy. Soliloquy (a character, alone on stage, thinking aloud for himself) too is communication of sorts. Communication is only incidental to it. The speaker does not speak to communicate; for he is all alone on the stage. We simply overhear his self-communing.
Public life too is a theatre. Actors come and go. A few strut and pontificate. They think they have the poor to kill with looks. They perform. We watch. The show ends. We go home. What happened on the stage has no bearing on the nuts and bolts of our day to day life.
Living is a personal adventure. Increasingly that will be the case, henceforth. Governments see anything but citizens. Governance is a mega game. The common is too small to matter and too stupid to know what it is. Experts have no time to explain what it is. Leaders are in a hurry to get along with it, even if they do not know what it is.
In such a context, socialist, secular, democratic Republic boils down mostly to one thing. Take care of yourself. Do not expect to matter in anything beyond yourself. The country is too preoccupied with big things to see small people.
That’s not a bad thing; for it could make us realistic and responsible. We do have some powers and many possibilities, if only we care to see them. We need to enter into their fullness. Those who don’t, become de facto beggars. They sit at the doors of maibaps (godfathers) expecting, begging for, favours. And think that the crumbs that fall from the master’s table is a royal feast. They are, come on, meant for dogs and puppies.
At the fag end of my life, having struggled all along, I know only one thing. There are no ready-made rights for those who don’t matter. There is, nonetheless, one duty which is egalitarian. The duty to grow to one’s full stature and potential. That is what Nature teaches us all the time, though within its own limitations.
Consider the lilies of the field, or the birds of the air! Consider the myriad miracles of that surround us. Each one of them is fully developed. A flower, a bird, a drop of water, an atom of Oxygen: all of them at their absolute best. They are 100 percent.
A human being is the least developed of all creatures at birth. We all started from zero. We had, as compared to animals, a long period of dependence, nurture and training. Why was that so? And why is that absent from Nature?
In Nature, potentials are limited. The scope of a flower or a bird is only as much as it exemplifies. So, there is no margin for personal choice either to neglect or to develop oneself. No bird or animal can make such choices. We can. That is why we are political and creatures are natural.
Our prolonged state of under-development, out of which we emerge ever so slowly, is the best thing about our predicament. It means that we have almost an infinite scope for growth in every aspect and every direction. We are not limited. We are unique. To me, freedom is the availability of conditions conducive to one’s full and total growth.
Growth cannot be borrowed. Nor can it be induced by any agency. Growth is a personal choice and an individual undertaking. The proof that we are growing is that the various folds of our dependence fall off, one after another. It is into ever-widening freedom that we grow.
How stupid and naïve it is to think of freedom –which we are celebrating today- as the mere absence of oppression, or as the breaking of alien yokes. But not all yokes are phoren! Not all yokes have departed, or will ever depart. Else, Rousseau would not have said, “Man is born free, but everywhere he is in chains.”
In contrast, Rousseau’s compatriot Montaigne said, “Human freedom is unlimited, only human powers are limited.” There is an important insight here.
We need to link between freedom and our powers, as Montaigne does. The scope of our freedom depends on the extent of our power. So, there is a dialogic relationship between freedom and development, which activates our powers.
The Christian community needs to wake up and be wise. The old habit of nursing grievances about being marginalized should be thrown out of the window! Nobody can marginalize anybody. Only we can marginalize ourselves.
It is a pity, if inclusion is seen as peanuts of State charity. Inclusion must be redefined dynamically as issuing from compelling relevance. From the time of Plato, we’ve known that the outcome of growth is increasing and ever-widening personal and communitarian relevance. Only look at the Parsis; no further argument will be needed.
To celebrate the Republic Day in a meaningful way is for us to grow as a community so that we become a cherished asset to the nation. We shall not expect to be thanked or rewarded for staying shriveled and incapacitated. Remember the vision given to Abram, as he was called out of the land of Ur (Gen. 12. 1-2)? He was called to be a “blessing on the land.”
That is what being republican means to be. That’s how I’d celebrate my freedom, sing the National Anthem with full gusto and, if opportune, shout “Vande Matram! Short of this, it is all sanctified noise. It is, as Paul Kalanidhi says in his moving account of his tryst with cancer and death, “breath becoming air.”
(Valson Thampu is former principal of St. Stephen’s College, Delhi)