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. Rajeev MoothedathApril 17, 2018 at 9:33 PM

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

    ReplyDelete
  2. SubrotoApril 19, 2018 at 3:10 AM

    "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

Pranita a perverted genius

Bulldozer begins its work at Sawan Pranita was a perverted genius. She had Machiavelli’s brain, Octavian’s relentlessness, and Levin’s intellectual calibre. She could have worked wonders if she wanted. She could have created a beautiful world around her. She had the potential. Yet she chose to be a ruthless exterminator. She came to Sawan Public School just to kill it. A religious cult called Radha Soami Satsang Beas [RSSB] had taken over the school from its owner who had never visited the school for over 20 years. This owner, a prominent entrepreneur with a gargantuan ego, had come to the conclusion that the morality of the school’s staff was deviating from the wavelengths determined by him. Moreover, his one foot was inching towards the grave. I was also told that there were some domestic noises which were grating against his patriarchal sensibilities. One holy solution for all these was to hand over the school and its enormous campus (nearly 20 acres of land on the outskirts
12 comments
Read more

Machiavelli the Reverend

Let us go today , you and I, through certain miasmic streets. Nothing will be quite clear along our way because this journey is through some delusions and illusions. You will meet people wearing holy robes and talking about morality and virtues. Some of them will claim to be god’s men and some will make taller claims. Some of them are just amorphous. Invisible. But omnipotent. You can feel their power around you. On you. Oppressing you. Stifling you. Reverend Machiavelli is one such oppressive power. You will meet Franz Kafka somewhere along the way. Joseph K’s ghost will pass by. Remember Joseph K who was arrested one fine morning for a crime that nobody knew anything about? Neither Joseph nor the men who arrest him know why Joseph K is arrested. The power that keeps Joseph K under arrest is invisible. He cannot get answers to his valid questions from the visible agents of that power. He cannot explain himself to that power. Finally, he is taken to a quarry outside the town wher
19 comments
Read more

Levin the good shepherd

AI-generated image The lost sheep and its redeemer form a pet motif in Christianity. Jesus portrayed himself as a good shepherd many times. He said that the good shepherd will leave his 99 sheep in order to bring the lost sheep back to the fold. When he finds the lost sheep, the shepherd is happier about that one sheep than about the 99, Jesus claimed. He was speaking metaphorically. The lost sheep is the sinner in Jesus’ parable. Sin is a departure from the ‘right’ way. Angels raise a toast in heaven whenever a sinner returns to the ‘right’ path [Luke 15:10]. A lot of Catholic priests I know carry some sort of a Redeemer complex in their souls. They love the sinner so much that they cannot rest until they make the angels of God run for their cups of joy. I have also been fortunate to have one such priest-friend whom I shall call Levin in this post. He has befriended me right from the year 1976 when I was a blundering adolescent and he was just one year older than me. He possesse
8 comments
Read more

Nakulan the Outcast

Nakulan was one of the many tenants of Hevendrea . A professor in the botany department of the North Eastern Hill University, he was a very lovable person. Some sense of inferiority complex that came from his caste status made him scoff the very idea of his lovability. He lived with his wife and three children in one of Heavendrea’s many cottages. When he wanted to have a drink, he would walk over to my hut. We sipped our whiskies and discussed Shillong’s intriguing politics or something of the sort while my cassette player crooned gently in the background. Nakulan was more than ten years my senior by age. He taught a subject which had never aroused my interest at any stage of my life. It made no difference to me whether a leaf was pinnately compound or palmately compound. You don’t need to know about anther and stigma in order to understand a flower. My friend Levin would have ascribed my lack of interest in Nakulan’s subject to my egomania. I always thought that Nakulan lived
16 comments
Read more

Queen of Religion

She looked like Queen Victoria in the latter’s youth but with a snow-white head. She was slim, fair and graceful. She always smiled but the smile had no life. Someone on the campus described it as a “plastic smile.” She was charming by physical appearance. Soon all of us on the Sawan school campus would realise how deceptive appearances were. Queen took over the administration of Sawan school on behalf of her religious cult RSSB [Radha Soami Satsang Beas]. A lot was said about RSSB in the previous post. Its godman Gurinder Singh Dhillon is now 70 years old. I don’t know whether age has mellowed his lust for land and wealth. Even at the age of 64, he was embroiled in a financial scam that led to the fall of two colossal business enterprises, Fortis Healthcare and Religare finance. That was just a couple of years after he had succeeded in making Sawan school vanish without a trace from Delhi which he did for the sake of adding the school’s twenty-odd acres of land to his existing hun
8 comments
Read more