Skip to main content

The Republic of India

Dashrath Manjhi


My country is completing 75 years of its being a republic. I’ve been asked to deliver a short speech in the morning assembly of my school on the occasion. How to speak to young students on a political topic? I expressed my concern to a colleague who then asked me what being a republic actually means. Isn’t independence enough? That was enough for me to get the stuff for my speech.

Independence or freedom is dangerous without duties and responsibilities. The Constitution brings us those duties and responsibilities while also guaranteeing us the security we require as citizens. Liberty, fraternity, equality, justice, freedom to worship whichever god you like…

No, I can’t speak on those things to school students. So, I contemplated a while… and remembered Dashrath Manjhi.

In 1959, a poor young woman died in a remote village in Bihar. She had had a fall on the mountainside where she lived with her husband, Dashrath Manjhi, a poor tribesman. Dashrath wanted to save his young wife. But the hospital was far away. With the help of some villagers he carried his wife to the hospital trekking through the rugged mountain. She died before they could reach the hospital.

Dashrath’s life took an entirely different course after the death of his wife. He decided to construct a road that will cut through the mountain. Armed with nothing more than a hammer and a chisel, Dashrath embarked on a mission. His fellow villagers called him a lunatic. They thought he was driven insane by the death of this wife. Dashrath was just 25 years old. Young. Loving. Longing. Romantic. And then his love departed.

Dashrath sat down with a hammer and a chisel in the ridge of the mountain that separated the city from his village. Twenty-two years of chiselling. And then the road was completed. 110 metres long, 8 metres deep. That’s what Dashrath Manjhi’s hammer and chisel carved out of a mountain in 22 years. With no help from the government. No help from anyone.

This simple tribesman is going to be the hero of my speech on Monday. People like Dashrath Manjhi make their country a genuine republic. Dashrath Manjhi didn’t need any political rhetoric to do what he thought was the right thing to do. Dashrath Manjhi is a republic. I will chisel my cynicism, of course, while telling the story of this man to young students. 

Dashrath Manjhi

Z

Comments

  1. Yamini MacLeanJanuary 25, 2025 at 10:31 PM

    Hari OM
    Ah, the man who moved a mountain... excellent choice! YAM xx

    ReplyDelete
    Replies
    1. Tomichan MatheikalJanuary 26, 2025 at 12:56 PM

      The Mountain Man, yes, that's how he came to be known as.

      Delete
  2. Jose D. MaliekalJanuary 26, 2025 at 4:52 PM

    Republic is by Etymology is Res+ Publica = The Thing of the Public

    ReplyDelete
  3. magiceyeJanuary 26, 2025 at 5:26 PM

    Love makes life worth living. Hate destroys it. Manjhi is a great example.

    ReplyDelete
  4. sathishJanuary 26, 2025 at 7:17 PM

    I think he is somebody and something he did needs to be made viral and taken to the young lads.
    It is 'what you did to the country vs what the country did to you' !!

    I remember my father telling me stories about how people gather to clean the lakes and ponds in his days! The situation is different now, people gather only in social media to comment and make something useless viral!!!

    ReplyDelete
    Replies
    1. Tomichan MatheikalJanuary 26, 2025 at 8:34 PM

      Indeed, trivia becomes great now. The ridiculous goes viral. Culture of the superficial.

      Delete
  5. Liz A.January 27, 2025 at 4:49 AM

    As long as you have a good story, you can make a speech about anything and have a rapt audience. Good luck.

    ReplyDelete
    Replies
    1. Tomichan MatheikalJanuary 27, 2025 at 5:48 AM

      Thank you. Children love stories. And characters linger...

      Delete
  6. marietta pereiraJanuary 27, 2025 at 5:36 PM

    It's wonderful that you have highlighted this man's spirit and determination on this significant day. May his tribe increase.

    ReplyDelete
  7. Murthy K v v sJanuary 27, 2025 at 9:23 PM

    Today, most of the people want instant results. Manjhi is the perfect example of how great things were happened. My respect to the indomitable spirit of the man.

    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
47 comments
Read more

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...
2 comments
Read more

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...
18 comments
Read more

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...
16 comments
Read more

The Life of an Activist

Book Review   Title: I am What I am: A Memoir Author: Sunitha Krishnan Publisher: Westland, Chennai, 2024 Pages: 284 Sunitha Krishnan is more of a conqueror than a survivor. She was gangraped at the age of 15, and that too because she had started working for the uplift of the girls in a village. She used to interact with the girls, motivate them to go back to school, give them remedial classes, and discuss topics like menstrual hygiene “and other intimate issues”. Some men of the village didn’t like such “revolutionary” moves coming from a little girl. Eight such men violated Sunitha Krishnan one evening as she was returning home from the village. “Any sexual assault is a traumatic event and leaves deep scars on the psyche of the survivor. The shame, the guilt, the feeling of being tainted, the self-loathing that it brings in its wake is universal. I was no exception.” That is how the third chapter, title ‘The Girl Who Did Not Cry’, begins. Sunitha Krishnan didn’t l...
10 comments
Read more