I guess it was Hegel in one of his more caustic moods when he said that “What we really learn from history is that we DO NOT learn from history.” I will let you in on a little secret: It is often-times the individual himself who is responsible for the creation of his nemesis. At times directly or sometimes quite indirectly. They say Lucifer was God’s favourite angel once.
We have time and again seen that it has been our own follies which made us the targets of some of the most vicious conflicts in the history of the world. In 1945, after the Japanese war, Roosevelt didn't want the French people to stay in Indochina. So the Americans implanted the Vietminh. The Vietcong were invented by the Americans. In 1970s to overcome the invasion of Afghanistan by the USSR the USA poured billions and billions of dollars worth of arms and ammunitions on the craggy mountain dwelling Mujahedeen to fight their war for them and now the FBI detains anybody with a Muslim name as a terror suspect in unnamed detention facilities which are not even on the US soil, under auspices of the Patriot Act. At one time we had Donald Rumsfeld being extremely matey with Saddam Hussein at the behest of Regan merely ten years before he was being branded a scourge of the Middle East. The Chechen are fighting for a cause at time was espoused by the Russians themselves. The Brits promised the holy land to the Arabs (ironic as its indigenous population had always consisted of Arabs, Jews and Christens since the time crusades anyway) in return of their help in the World War 2 and handed it over to the Jews, giving vent to a strife which has lasted for decades.
We Indians have not had that clean a record too. Political parties have been pretty successful in demarcating the boundaries on the basis of caste, language and whatever the fuck else they can think of to consolidate their vote banks. Xenophobia is pretty popular a tool with them I believe. I wake up one morning and I find that suddenly it is not sufficient that I am just me. I either have to be a Maharashtrian or Non-Maharashrtian, a Hindu or Non-Hindu, Open or Reserved. A fucking brave new world we are living in. The scourge of our time is that we have enough of misguided youth to follow these demagogues. Nietzsche used to say that "We mine the past for myths to buttress our present." And our dear leaders are doing a damn good job of it. Our country is being pulled apart like a corpse being torn into pieces by a pack of rabid dogs. Be it the Islamic fundamentalists, the Naxalites, the Maoists, the LTTE or our very own breed of Hindu fundamentalists who are a class of their own. I have practically lost count of the number of times we have been attacked. The number of cities that have burned. The number of homes destroyed. Bombay? Kashmir? Godhara? Nandigram? The screams don’t just shut up. And look at the television. We are parading our latest acquisitions: Bigger guns and larger firepower in front of the bloodthirsty crowd to appease them into a false sense of security. I don’t say that we are not to arm ourselves up. To protect the innocent is after all the duty of the state and every citizen. But to simplify the complex problem and assume that we can pull of an Alexander by cutting the Gordian knot is just wishful thinking on our parts. There is a long way to go and this is just a beginning. Someday we will finally open our eyes and decide to get rid of the puppet strings guiding our moves.
Someday we will take a pause before judging someone indiscriminately and actually put ourselves in his position for a while.
Someday we will care.... enough.
John Godfrey Saxe's poem on the famous Indian parable "The Blindmen and the Elephant" concludes:
"...And so these men of Hindustan
Disputed loud and long,
Each in his own opinion
Exceeding stiff and strong,
Though each was partly in the right
And all were in the wrong.
So oft in theologic wars,
The disputants, I ween,
Rail on in utter ignorance
Of what each other mean,
And prate about an Elephant
Not one of them has seen!"
Well... I wanna see the damn elephant!
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