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Monday 5 November, 2007
By Vikas Vij 10:18 5/Nov/2007 7 Comment(s)
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Pain, physical or mental, can have such a damaging and permanent influence that it can paralyse the mind forever. In a jail, if you torture an innocent victim too hard, he will almost start believing that he is the murderer, even if he had actually nothing to do with the crime altogether.Fear of pain and fear of being killed are the chief weapons of a dictator which he uses effectively. You can single-handedly force an entire nation to crawl on all fours before you, if you can terrify them enough.Fear blurs logic completely. You can start fearing your own shadow if you are walking alone in the dark in an abandoned alley in the middle of the night. Even if the shadow can do no harm, and it is powerless like a paper tiger, yet you cannot get rid of the fear as you imagine it to be someone much more powerful than it actually is. The fear of being attacked or killed by something or someone is so overwhelming in such a situation that it paralyses logic.Gandhi was one man who dared to face fear logically, and realised the hollowness of its claims. The moment he decided that death or a jail term was "okay" for him, he had no fear of these any longer. Once you have accepted the worst, you are not afraid anymore.Gandhi destroyed the colonialists' only weapon -- fear. There was a powerful scene in Richard Attenborough's well-researched film "Gandhi", where Gandhi tells his followers that each one of them will keep breaking the police cordon, and keep getting hit by their wooden batons on the head -- without any retaliation in return. At each hit, the man would fall down, and the next man would come forward to face the next hit. One after another after another. That one single piece of cinema must be one of the clearest and most visual demonstrations ever of how to finish the game of fear.The job of the police baton is not to hit you, but to scare you. If you refuse to get scared, you have punctured the dictator's plan. Why? Because the numbers are already hugely against him. He is one. You are innumberable. He cannot win this unequal battle by force. He can only win it by paralysing you psychologically. There is an old Chinese saying that a panther would attack you much more ferociously than it does, if it knew that you are afraid of it. In 1989, the Chinese students took to the streets in a massive uprising against communism, and took seize of the Tiananmen Square in Beijing. The government quickly understood that it was a battle of fear versus fearlessness, and that the hollowness of fear would be soon exposed, unless fearlessness was nipped in the bud. The government swiftly ordered its military to open fire on unarmed students, and as per the New York Times count, about 800 civilians were killed, while the Red Cross estimated the number of dead to be around 3000. (3 times the Jallianwala Bagh massacre).Like China, even Pakistan is a slave nation till today. The great Punjabi poet of Lahore, Ustaad Daaman, had summed up the fate of Pakistan quite succintly in two short lines as follows: Pakistan de dou KhudaLa ila, tey Marshal Law But now Pakistan, after nearly sixty years of perfect slavery (with a few brief interruptions), is finally waking up from its paralysis of fear, and raising its voice against the shame of dictatorship. Men like Justice Choudhary, Imran Khan, Benazir Bhutto or the fearless owners of Geo TV etc. are finally getting to a point where fear is no longer an option. They must maintain their courage in their trial by fire. They are not alone, because the Pakistani masses are with them. Though the Indian Ministry of External Affairs has merely "regretted" the emergency in Pakistan, but our message to our Pakistani friends should be slightly more straightforward: If you can have the courage to expose fear, you will see that the emperor has actually no clothes. Dictatorship is a guaranteed hoax. It is a toy bomb hijacking an entire airplane. Have guts to call their bluff and you will see limitless cowardice beneath their upper false layer of cruelty. If you decide to stand up to their terrorism, the cowards will run for their life, and seek amnesty for their crimes from you only.But of course, it is easier said than done. To overcome fear, sometimes even centuries are not enough. Fearless men are not born everyday.
Monday 5 November, 2007
By Vikas Vij 10:18 5/Nov/2007 7 Comment(s)
Add Vikas Vij as Friend Write to Vikas Vij Forward this link
Pain, physical or mental, can have such a damaging and permanent influence that it can paralyse the mind forever. In a jail, if you torture an innocent victim too hard, he will almost start believing that he is the murderer, even if he had actually nothing to do with the crime altogether.Fear of pain and fear of being killed are the chief weapons of a dictator which he uses effectively. You can single-handedly force an entire nation to crawl on all fours before you, if you can terrify them enough.Fear blurs logic completely. You can start fearing your own shadow if you are walking alone in the dark in an abandoned alley in the middle of the night. Even if the shadow can do no harm, and it is powerless like a paper tiger, yet you cannot get rid of the fear as you imagine it to be someone much more powerful than it actually is. The fear of being attacked or killed by something or someone is so overwhelming in such a situation that it paralyses logic.Gandhi was one man who dared to face fear logically, and realised the hollowness of its claims. The moment he decided that death or a jail term was "okay" for him, he had no fear of these any longer. Once you have accepted the worst, you are not afraid anymore.Gandhi destroyed the colonialists' only weapon -- fear. There was a powerful scene in Richard Attenborough's well-researched film "Gandhi", where Gandhi tells his followers that each one of them will keep breaking the police cordon, and keep getting hit by their wooden batons on the head -- without any retaliation in return. At each hit, the man would fall down, and the next man would come forward to face the next hit. One after another after another. That one single piece of cinema must be one of the clearest and most visual demonstrations ever of how to finish the game of fear.The job of the police baton is not to hit you, but to scare you. If you refuse to get scared, you have punctured the dictator's plan. Why? Because the numbers are already hugely against him. He is one. You are innumberable. He cannot win this unequal battle by force. He can only win it by paralysing you psychologically. There is an old Chinese saying that a panther would attack you much more ferociously than it does, if it knew that you are afraid of it. In 1989, the Chinese students took to the streets in a massive uprising against communism, and took seize of the Tiananmen Square in Beijing. The government quickly understood that it was a battle of fear versus fearlessness, and that the hollowness of fear would be soon exposed, unless fearlessness was nipped in the bud. The government swiftly ordered its military to open fire on unarmed students, and as per the New York Times count, about 800 civilians were killed, while the Red Cross estimated the number of dead to be around 3000. (3 times the Jallianwala Bagh massacre).Like China, even Pakistan is a slave nation till today. The great Punjabi poet of Lahore, Ustaad Daaman, had summed up the fate of Pakistan quite succintly in two short lines as follows: Pakistan de dou KhudaLa ila, tey Marshal Law But now Pakistan, after nearly sixty years of perfect slavery (with a few brief interruptions), is finally waking up from its paralysis of fear, and raising its voice against the shame of dictatorship. Men like Justice Choudhary, Imran Khan, Benazir Bhutto or the fearless owners of Geo TV etc. are finally getting to a point where fear is no longer an option. They must maintain their courage in their trial by fire. They are not alone, because the Pakistani masses are with them. Though the Indian Ministry of External Affairs has merely "regretted" the emergency in Pakistan, but our message to our Pakistani friends should be slightly more straightforward: If you can have the courage to expose fear, you will see that the emperor has actually no clothes. Dictatorship is a guaranteed hoax. It is a toy bomb hijacking an entire airplane. Have guts to call their bluff and you will see limitless cowardice beneath their upper false layer of cruelty. If you decide to stand up to their terrorism, the cowards will run for their life, and seek amnesty for their crimes from you only.But of course, it is easier said than done. To overcome fear, sometimes even centuries are not enough. Fearless men are not born everyday.
The national poet of Pakistan, Iqbal knew what he was talking when he spoke these lofty words in praise of Gandhi:
Hazaaro'n saal nargis apni bey'noori pey roti hai
Badi mushqil sey hota hai, chaman mein deedaawar paida
nargis = earth
bey'noori = absence of charm
deedaawar = the one who is worth watching
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