Skip to main content

Overcome

Image from Fluidsurveys


You may feel oppressed at least occasionally. Even in a well-oiled democratic system, the citizens can feel oppressed by various policies of the State. As poet Louis Macneice said in his poem, Prayer before Birth, the world can convert us into “lethal automatons,” make us “a cog in a machine,” or blow us “like thistledown hither and thither.”

The State and its various machineries may decide what food you can or cannot eat, what kind of dress you should wear, how much money you can save, and so on. The State can make you feel powerless. There are even States which encourage one section of the citizens to eliminate another section. Both the eliminator and the victim are powerless. You want to overcome the lies  that create powerlessness.

There is only one way of overcoming that kind of powerlessness: living in your personal truth.

The State compels us to live within a lie, as political thinker Vaclav Havel said. You don’t have to accept the lies foisted on you by the State. You may have to accept those lies in order to be a law-abiding citizen. You have no choice in that matter. You have no choice but pay the umpteen taxes, for instance. You have no choice if your State decides to ban a certain food in the country. There are thousands of people in many nation-states who are forced to wear a particular kind of dress much as their hearts rebel against it.

The State cannot exercise any power over your soul, however. Your spirit. Your conscience. Call it what you like. The powerlessness of those in power begins there: in your soul.

Power has its rituals like making and enacting laws or foisting certain lies and illusions on the citizens using protean propaganda or terror agencies that look like political or religious organisations. But power cannot kill that part of our being which relentlessly yearns for freedom, truth and dignity. As long as we keep that spirit alive, we can overcome oppressive powers.

We can begin by expressing our feelings and ideas in social media or other places like political meetings. We can express solidarity with those whom our conscience commands us to support. We can reject certain rituals of the State and break certain rules of the game. We may have to pay certain prices for our actions. But redeeming our soul from oppressive powers is worth the prices. We cannot live in a lie for too long without losing our dignity.

Every time we choose to accept the State-created lies, our spirit shrinks and the nation becomes more of a quagmire. When more and more people begin to assert their right to live in truth, the power of governments and other oppressive systems begins to erode and the nation becomes richer. A great nation is made up of people who overcome the lies of political systems.

PS. #BlogchatterA2Z



Comments

  1. "A great nation is made up of people who overcome the lies of political systems."- Good one!

    ReplyDelete
  2. "When more and more people begin to assert their right to live in truth, the power of governments and other oppressive systems begins to erode and the nation becomes richer."
    Most excellently said. Absolutely agree with you.

    ReplyDelete

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

The Adventures of Toto as a comic strip

  'The Adventures of Toto' is an amusing story by Ruskin Bond. It is prescribed as a lesson in CBSE's English course for class 9. Maggie asked her students to do a project on some of the lessons and Femi George's work is what I would like to present here. Femi converted the story into a beautiful comic strip. Her work will speak for itself and let me present it below.  Femi George Student of Carmel Public School, Vazhakulam, Kerala Similar post: The Little Girl

Don Bosco

Don Bosco (16 Aug 1815 - 31 Jan 1888) In Catholic parlance, which flows through my veins in spite of myself, today is the Feast of Don Bosco. My life was both made and unmade by Don Bosco institutions. Any great person can make or break people because of his followers. Religious institutions are the best examples. I’m presenting below an extract from my forthcoming book titled Autumn Shadows to celebrate the Feast of Don Bosco in my own way which is obviously very different from how it is celebrated in his institutions today. Do I feel nostalgic about the Feast? Not at all. I feel relieved. That’s why this celebration. The extract follows. Don Bosco, as Saint John Bosco was popularly known, had a remarkably good system for the education of youth.   He called it ‘preventive system’.   The educators should be ever vigilant so that wrong actions are prevented before they can be committed.   Reason, religion and loving kindness are the three pillars of that syste...

Relatives and Antidepressants

One of the scenes that remain indelibly etched in my memory is from a novel of Malayalam writer O V Vijayan. Father and little son are on a walk. Father tells son, “Walk carefully, son, otherwise you may fall down.” Son: “What will happen if I fall?” Father: "Relatives will laugh.” I seldom feel comfortable with my relatives. In fact, I don’t feel comfortable in any society, but relatives make it more uneasy. The reason, as I’ve understood, is that your relatives are the last people to see any goodness in you. On the other hand, they are the first ones to discover all your faults. Whenever certain relatives visit, my knees buckle and the blood pressure shoots up. I behave quite awkwardly. They often describe my behaviour as arising from my ego, which used to be a oversized in yesteryear. I had a few such visitors the other day. The problem was particularly compounded by their informing me that they would be arriving by about 3.30 pm and actually reaching at about 7.30 pm. ...

Coffee can be bitter

The dawns of my childhood were redolent of filtered black coffee. We were woken up before the birds started singing in the lush green village landscape outside home. The sun would split the darkness of the eastern sky with its splinter of white radiance much after we children had our filtered coffee with a small lump of jaggery. Take a bite of the jaggery and then a sip of the coffee. Coffee was a ritual in our home back then. Perhaps our parents believed it would jolt our neurons awake and help us absorb our lessons before we set out on the 4-kilometre walk to school after all the morning rituals at home. After high school, when I left home for further studies at a distant place, the ritual of the morning coffee stopped. It resumed a whole decade later when I completed my graduation and took up a teaching job in Shillong. But I had lost my taste for filtered coffee by then; tea took its place. Plain tea without milk – what is known as red tea in most parts of India. Coffee ret...

The Real Enemies of India

People in general are inclined to pass the blame on to others whatever the fault.  For example, we Indians love to blame the British for their alleged ‘divide-and-rule’ policy.  Did the British really divide India into Hindus and Muslims or did the Indians do it themselves?  Was there any unified entity called India in the first place before the British unified it? Having raised those questions, I’m going to commit a further sacrilege of quoting a British journalist-cum-historian.  In his magnum opus, India: a History , John Keay says that the “stock accusations of a wider Machiavellian intent to ‘divide and rule’ and to ‘stir up Hindu-Muslim animosity’” levelled against the British Raj made little sense when the freedom struggle was going on in India because there really was no unified India until the British unified it politically.  Communal divisions existed in India despite the political unification.  In fact, they existed even before the Briti...