There is a story that links two eminent Americans. When United States invaded Mexico in 1846, Henry Thoreau, the great naturalist, refused to pay his taxes in an act of civil disobedience against the US and was sent to prison. His close friend and mentor from Harvard, Ralph Waldo Emerson, came to see him in jail. Emerson quipped, “What are you doing inside?” The reply made Emerson blush. “What are you doing outside?” asked Thoreau.
The pungent retort from Thoreau resonates well for the people of Kashmir. With hundreds of people behind the bars, the question entails equal embarrassment for all those who stand ‘free’ outside. Perhaps, the minds that have stopped thinking freely have a trial to face. The kind of thinking inertia has made us follow hackneyed means, which were carved consequently. The pioneering and innovative methods of bringing change never developed. The clichéd rut overtook us inadvertently since there were no attempts of alternative options thought and chalked out creatively.
At times, it does seem that the factor of discriminating desensitization has crept in so chronically in all spheres of our lives that thinking beyond the line is impossible. Be it political, social or routine matters, we don’t dare to think and act differently.
The crippled thought system has led many of our thinkers into a strange intellectual hallucination. Somewhat complacent with contemporary situation prevailing in Kashmir, their arguments usually blink over the searing realities. Rhetoric is an old symptom; their perceptions are entirely illusive and unworkable. The crackpot ideas they dish out from their closets has rarely any practical bearing. And for those who are trapped in a spiral of silence, their role is obnoxiously fatal.
For the masses, other than the thinkers, the nerve for disagreement has died down over the past few years. The culture of conciliation has thrived so systematically and severely that the exceptional ones who disagree, are victimized both overtly and covertly. Even the level of victimization has gone down so foul and cheap. Picking up yes-men (or for that matter, women) or dropping out the disagreeable lot; creating a coterie of nodding; promoting yeas and demoting nays; lobbying for likeminded; ostracizing the differing— it all happens because the culture of hearing NO has become utterly unacceptable in our society now.
The grit to object and put your foot down summons a huge cost. Subsequently, the social inequity and injustice, so prominent in our society, has oddly become invisible. The earlier concept of social haves’ and have-nots’ appears diminutive in comparison to the prevailing discriminations met out through planned and organized ways by individuals at different positions. And the cheek of this kind of unfairness is the unspoken sanction and submission it gets from all and sundry.
The culture of induced silence has mutated the social dynamics. The rot of every sort and its acceptability as a social currency has changed the meanings of sense and sensibility for us. The young generation that is grooming in such constructions of social reality is not willing to listen to anyone.
One fails to conjure up the times when society was as dead as its today. The criminal silence has reached a high point. The blaze of indifference has trailed the trajectory to the extreme. The common people are keeping mum towards every wrong. The fear psychosis and abuse, generated by some of the native people as well by the non-natives, has a narcotic effect on the people. People don’t react, even over small injustices. And then, seeing a gross anomaly in treatment towards the erring and the blameless, the known and the unknown forces, the layperson is speechless…Ki Sang-o-Kisht Muqaid Hain Aur Sang Azaad.
Bottomline: As a living society, the one that is not soulless, there is a need to give people a choice to be and not to be. Apart from doing a little for those incarcerated for something related to us collectively, we can do our bit, at individual level, for the good health of this nation. At least, we can speak up!