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

The Little Girl

The Little Girl is a short story by Katherine Mansfield given in the class 9 English course of NCERT. Maggie gave an assignment to her students based on the story and one of her students, Athena Baby Sabu, presented a brilliant job. She converted the story into a delightful comic strip. Mansfield tells the story of Kezia who is the eponymous little girl. Kezia is scared of her father who wields a lot of control on the entire family. She is punished severely for an unwitting mistake which makes her even more scared of her father. Her grandmother is fond of her and is her emotional succour. The grandmother is away from home one day with Kezia's mother who is hospitalised. Kezia gets her usual nightmare and is terrified. There is no one at home to console her except her father from whom she does not expect any consolation. But the father rises to the occasion and lets the little girl sleep beside him that night. She rests her head on her father's chest and can feel his heart...
17 comments
Read more

Ram, Anandhi, and Co

Book Review Title: Ram C/o Anandhi Author: Akhil P Dharmajan Translator: Haritha C K Publisher: HarperCollins India, 2025 Pages: 303 T he author tells us in his prefatory note that “this (is) a cinematic novel.” Don’t read it as literary work but imagine it as a movie. That is exactly how this novel feels like: an action-packed thriller. The story revolves around Ram, a young man who lands in Chennai for joining a diploma course in film making, and Anandhi, receptionist of Ram’s college. Then there are their friends: Vetri and his half-sister Reshma, and Malli who is a transgender. An old woman, who is called Paatti (grandmother) by everyone and is the owner of the house where three of the characters live, has an enviably thrilling role in the plot.   In one of the first chapters, Ram and Anandhi lock horns over a trifle. That leads to some farcical action which agitates Paatti’s bees which in turn fly around stinging everyone. Malli, the aruvani (transgender), s...
8 comments
Read more

The Blind Lady’s Descendants

Book Review Title: The Blind Lady’s Descendants Author: Anees Salim Publisher: Penguin India 2015 Pages: 301 Price: Rs 399 A metaphorical blindness is part of most people’s lives.  We fail to see many things and hence live partial lives.  We make our lives as well as those of others miserable with our blindness.  Anees Salim’s novel which won the Raymond & Crossword award for fiction in 2014 explores the role played by blindness in the lives of a few individuals most of whom belong to the family of Hamsa and Asma.  The couple are not on talking terms for “eighteen years,” according to the mother.  When Amar, the youngest son and narrator of the novel, points out that he is only sixteen, Asma reduces it to fifteen and then to ten years when Amar refers to the child that was born a few years after him though it did not survive.  Dark humour spills out of every page of the book.  For example: How reckless Akmal was! ...
5 comments
Read more

A Curious Case of Food

From CNN  whose headline is:  Holy cow! India is the world's largest beef exporter The Curious Incident of the Dog in the Night-Time by Mark Haddon is perhaps the only novel I’ve read in which food plays a significant, though not central, role, particularly in deepening the reader’s understanding of Christopher Boone’s character. Christopher, the protagonist, is a 15-year-old autistic boy. [For my earlier posts on the novel, click here .] First of all, food is a symbol of order and control in the novel. Christopher’s relationship with food is governed by strict rules and routines. He likes certain foods and detests a few others. “I do not like yellow things or brown things and I do not eat yellow or brown things,” he tells us innocently. He has made up some of these likes and dislikes in order to bring some sort of order and predictability in a world that is very confusing for him. The boy’s food preferences are tied to his emotional state. If he is served a breakfast o...
6 comments
Read more