The Tragedy of Silence
My laptop had frozen for
the last three weeks and could not be charged as the socket that connects the
charger had gone out of order. This happened on the 4th of September,
the fateful day when Gowri Lankesh was killed so that her dissenting voice
shall be no more heard. For once I did
not fret and fume over the laptop that had gone kaput. I preferred to stay away
from it lest I should do something stupid by allowing my feelings to overrun
the alphabets on the keyboard.
I am not a Kannadiga
and I am not multilingual even with reference to the four south Indian
languages as they are all as different as chalk and cheese. I know no Kannada
to claim some kind of ideological intimacy with Gowri Lankesh who was a Kannada
journalist. I am not by profession a journalist to claim professional
fraternization. I am not one among her wide circle of friends to know about her
compassionate social activism that transcended
journalism whereby she provided support and succour to many less privileged persons.
It is only after her brutal and frontal assassination that I learnt that she had adopted the young student activists -
Kanhaiya Kumar and Umar Khalid, Jignesh Mevani and Shehla Rashid, and others
whose names we do not know - as her "ideological children"
.
Ironically only after
her death, her life unfurled before me ( and must have unfurled before many thousands of others as unaware and
unknowledgeable like me) and shocked me to silence all these three weeks. I am
yet to overcome the psychological trauma as
a result of this severely distressing tragedy. Gowri Lankesh’s sudden removal
from her world of ideas, ideologies and political and social activism is a case
of absolute tragedy which in simple terms underlines the colossal waste of
one’s potential. “Cut is the branch that
should have grown full high”, says Marlowe about his tragic protagonists whose rise
to greatness was cut before its fruition. It does not matter whether they met
with their doomed destiny because of the inherent tragic flaw in their
character, but what is significant is life once snuffed cannot resuscitated. But today, the protagonists are
silenced not by any inherent flaw in their character but by unknown faces that
pull the trigger and silence them forever. The sound of silence is the sound of
the gunshot.
One
does not have to subscribe to Gowri’s articles of faith; one does not have to
discuss whether she was right or wrong, balanced or prejudiced, tendentious or sensational,
acerbic or brutally honest-in other words, one does not have to be judgmental on what she
said or wrote, for overarching all these is the bare fact of a life having been snuffed out, a life that
had the potential to envision and bring to fruition a new perspective on
the current political and social order .
The
bullets that riddled her body bludgeoned me and many others into silence. I was
repeatedly cautioned at home that I should not give vent to my feelings. So was I advised by many friends and well
wishers not to let my fingers do the talking. It was simply a return to my
nursery days when finger on the lips was an order to be implicitly obeyed. The
laptop that had gone powerless seems to have endorsed the wisdom of going
silent in the face of such a tragedy.
It
has taken me three weeks to wear off the shell shock and come to terms with the
truth that Gowri has moved into the silent zone, never to return. She is the
only one who could identify her killers
but she can no longer communicate. The truth is she has joined the trio of
Pansare, Kalburgi and Dhabolkar whose murderers have defied identification in
the eternal silence of their victims. The killing of these four rationalists is
an indicator that there are irrationalists and fundamentalists
among us who want to silence rational voices with bullets. It sounds a warning
for all those outspoken people who dare
to raise their voices against irrationality, superstition and to hold opinions,
write and speak about them and reveal an alternate mirror to society that reflects a new order
founded on sound reasoning and reasoned
judgement.
Many voices have
spoken in the aftermath of the latest killing about the right to speech and
expression. I have nothing new to offer. But I have a different take on this subject.
It is about the tragedy of silence. All the four have been rendered silent and
in turn have frightened and chilled many others into numbness. The power of violence is tragic as the life snuffed
out cannot be regained. The loss is irrevocable and cannot be compensated. It
is all the more poignant when the voices that have been silenced are the voices
of sanity and humanity. What a colossal waste of god given intelligence and humaneness
by one fatal act of brutality and violence! Tragedy is not merely something
over which we only shed tears. Tragedy is not something that frightens us to
submission to powers that cause it. Tragedy is not something that shows us to
be in Shakespearean words flies unto wanton boys who kill us for their sport.
Tragedy will show us as poor mortals if it cowers us into silence .Tragedy will
be humiliating if we abjectly surrender to hostile forces that act like brutish
beasts with no reason or logic behind their act of destruction. This is true of
all killings where innocent people are
killed for the killers to assert their brutal power under the guise of fundamentalism
and religious bigotry. They have abandoned the god given reason and intellect and
inflict pain and suffering on hundreds of innocent people whom they neither
know nor have relationship of any kind. They don’t understand nor care for the
pain of a father losing his son, of a wife losing a husband, of a sister losing
a sibling, ofa child losing its parent(s).
They know not how to light a candle, they know how to snuff it; they live in darkness and would not want
others to live in light.
But they cannot convert their heinous act into
a tragedy if the sound of silence breaks
out when those who are silenced inspire millions to rise up and break the
barrier of silence. True Tragedy elevates Man to rise up to his
potential even when he is overpowered by forces that he cannot reckon with or
conquer. Gowri, Kalburgi, Dhabolkar, Panesar (and two more have joined - senior
journalists ,Shantanu Bhowmick and K.J.Singh, the latest victim) have walked
like Colossus and shown courage of conviction for which they had to be
eliminated. But their tragedy of silence has empowered many silent people to
rise up and voice forth their protest against inhumanity, intolerance and
invidiousness. They have shown how their
Tragedy of Silence shall
lead to resilience; their
Tragedy of Silence shall give voice to the voiceless millions and their
Tragedy of Silence shall
sound the bugle for Man to rise up to his full potential.
My laptop is now fully
charged and the sound of thumping on the keyboard has started once more.
m
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