Wednesday, 25 December 2013

Almost there

Almost there
The death of Nelson Mandela, and his subsequent farewell and burial was beamed live into our drawing rooms. Almost everyone agrees that the man was an inspiration to our souls; he was a proxy to many of us who only dream but fail to push those dreams into the realms of reality. Nelson Mandela also reminded us on what it takes to be compared with the great Mahatma Gandhi and what it takes to be chiselled into the pages of history.
Nelson Mandela has been epitomised not because he fought against apartheid or was the figure head of a struggle for equal rights. He was epitomised because of the method he choose for propagating his cause, the path of non-violence, the path of self-sacrifice. That is why he is compared to the very best, that is why he will be a part of history for ages to come. He has earned the distinction of being epitomised in a way that sets the rules for the future.
Actually if we think, most of us are Nelson Mandela’s in our own right, we have been fighting injustice to ourselves, to our family members, to our community, and some within the country and internationally, but none of us have been able to reach the standards set by this one man, because we have not inculcated self-sacrifice as one of the virtues. Imagine how lonely it would be to be placed in solitary confinement in a prison cell barely big enough to move around and stretch one self.
Imagine having to fight against one’s own consciousness to remain awake and alert to the outside world that is cut off from you. Imagine having to live with the cravings of an ordinary man and supressing it for the sake of his beliefs. Imagine being cut off from your loved ones, no touch or feel of your wife and kids. No soothing words, no high comments from your comrades, no proclamations of support, nothing to wake up to the morrow. Not for one or two but for an entire era for a torturous twenty seven long years.
How easy it is then to take a short cut, to fall victim to ones tormentors and their systematic chiding, to toe their line of deceit and short charge your own beliefs.  All one has to do is fall in line with the regime and lo! and behold he would have been a free man. How easy it would have been to serve a while and ask for freedom to be part epitomised into the minds of his people. All he had to do was ask and he would have instantly received with full gratitude to go along with it, but that would mean the end to his struggle and that of his people.
That would be the burial of his cause of seeing everyone equal in his country. That would be sending his ideals and beliefs to the gallows. That would be letting the world down.  It takes tremendous struggle, selfless sacrifice and a clear head to be able to withstand all this, even without guarantees that his cause would be fulfilled, that the climb would end someday successfully.
It was therefore very easy to fall prey to the guiles of the state as was in the case of Mikhail Khodorkovsky who served ten years in person and was taunted as the next Nelson Mandela for having taken on the might of Vladimir Putin the Russian President, against whom he had started a political campaign. He fought on ceaselessly and without remorse for a better part of the last ten years all through various indictments. He saw his vast oil empire fall before his own eyes, shattered and torn apart. Embezzlement and tax evasion charges were brought against him and he was brutally repressed for daring to take on the mightiest.
Yet he turned out to be a lesser mortal, an ordinary mortal like ourselves, except that he carried on the fight a little longer than us, except that he sacrificed his comforts for his beliefs a little longer than us, but he was unable to go over the hill whence from the top he could have had a smooth downhill ride. That is in fact the danger of carrying on a fight to derive a logical conclusion. Many a time all of us are faced with the practicality and reality of life and we make a compromise, an adjustment and pat ourselves on the back for having carried the fight thus far, for having waged a lonely furrow thus long and for being able to withstand the forces of opposition this while.
 Where we and Mikhail Khodorkovsky have failed is that we leave the fight midway to tend to our own, we seek to find a justification to deviate from the original ideas, and we are forced out of the race by circumstances. This is where Mikhail Khodorkovsky failed and that is why he failed to find a place among the mortals that is why he ends up being one of us. The climb to the top of the cliff is daunting, stiff and full of trouble. Your cup of woes may seem never ending. Friends and family leave you by the wayside. Comrades may be seen at a distance, but the tenacity of your belief and ideals and your methods have to stand the test of time.
Then alone would you be able to stand at the top and have an easy downhill ride. Then alone can you flag your cause rather than join the numerous people who started the journey but saw reasons to stop before reaching the peak. To be a Nelson Mandela one has to be a lonely traveller with only your beliefs and ideals for company and incur the wrath of the majority, believing in not achieving anything for yourself but destroying yourself for the restoration of your fellow beings. For, though you lose everything in your arduous battle and strenuous climb to the top, you would have won your soul and the hearts and minds of your people, while being able to claim your place in history.
Robin Varghese- robin_vargh@yahoo.com
Dated: 24th December 2013

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