Saturday, 23 September 2017

The Tragedy of Silence



                                                          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.
             








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