| nescient |
Posted
on 04-Apr-04 04:58 AM
SENSE AND SENSIBILITY
- Akash Shrestha
8:34 PM. 20 degrees, dry and breezy. Thamel - the sunnier side of the city that awakes while the rest of her prepares for bed.
“Are the two of you sisters?” sneers a sturdy, middle-aged man clad in a military outfit, as he gently nudges his companion dressed in similar attire. “No, dajju,” comes a meek reply from Laxmi, aged 14 years or maybe younger, whilst she secretly steals a glance from her companion. Laxmi runs a small roadside stall that sells cigarettes, chewing tobacco and toffees to a mixed clientele of Nepalis, Americans, British and Israelis in a bustling corner of Thamel.
“But the two of you look so much alike, as if you are children from the same mother,” exclaims the army personnel encouragingly. “Well, if not the same mother, then the same father at least,” guffaws his companion as the two share a momentary laugh of what they might have called a joke. Laxmi continues to stare at the floor, literally trying to hold the drops of pain from rolling down her cheeks. In the meantime, the second army personnel nonchalantly tears off a packet of chewing tobacco from the stall shelf. “I’m taking one of these, la,” he says.
An onlooker to the scene, I silently pay for my packet of cigarettes and walk off home. Helpless. Disturbed. Sorry. If these were my feelings, I could not help but think about how Laxmi must have felt through the entire episode. Helpless? Depressed? Sorry? Feelings any different than my own? I could not gauge the difference.
But this is one example of what goes on in the lives of people like Laxmi in the veiled danger of a city like Kathmandu. Imagine the suppressed screams of people in locales more overt than ours. Imagine poverty, filth, illiteracy that hasn’t yet found a voice to override political priorities. Imagine helplessness, depression and sorrow. And now imagine yourself in that position! What would you do?
Suppress or shout? Be indifferent or be different? I, for one, would choose the latter. And be labeled a ‘revolutionist’? If that matters. What matters more to me is what I label – rights, opportunity, security. And that must be precisely what our present day ‘revolutionists’ must have felt, initially, at least. The reason I say ‘initially’ is for what it really is now…tragically, a u-turn of objectives, a lost cause…what started off as the last straw in the war called ‘voice’ sadly culminating as the final straw in a battle called ‘indifference’ – a-‘when you got nothing, you got nothing to lose’-attitude.
And the aftermath? Sprawling headlines claiming, “50 dead, several injured in yet another guerilla attack.” More helplessness. More depression. More sorrow. A vicious cycle that feeds from and into the very same emotions.
And yet, we, the onlookers, stand (or sit), taking sides between the ‘compliant’ and the ‘revolutionist’, knowing all along that both sides are equally weak – both with the power, but both without the comprehension to channel that power. If the ‘compliant’ possesses the power of position, the ‘revolutionist’ possesses the power of plight. Both affect and, ironically, both are the affected. While the power of plight falls (or has fallen) on deaf ears of the power of position, the power of position has deafened all senses of compromise of the power of plight. And while all of this may already sound confusing as I write, it seems all the more bewildering as we see it.
So when would this power struggle, confusion, whatever, ever end? The answer lies, ironically, in power, yet again, but with a reversal of roles! Let the compliant ones now be the revolutionists – the radicals of change who will not look at position but at plight and work with solutions to remedy that. And let the revolutionists now be the compliant – the sustaining forces of a cause that reverberates in remedies rather than fresher problems. More simply stated, let those with the power of plight refrain from unworkable demands and let those with the power of position work on the workable ones – the ‘middle path’ as the Buddha would have described it, and why not, when we take pride in our land as the land of the Buddha, the over-used ‘land of Never Ending Peace And Love’?
Yet I still remain an onlooker. Helpless. Depressed. Sorry!
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