Icons

Icons, idols, mastheads-The Symbols. The askew thinking of man. Turning saints into Satan, God into a murderer and religion into the deadliest weapon of all. Atom bomb! I’m petrified. I hear him preach religion, sword in hand, and atom bombs seem like childhood toys from a distant Diwali.

        Blind, deaf, dumb- apt words to describe the audience? Blind to such an extent that darkness is the brightest light. Daylight is just a figment of the imagination or maybe a reality too offbeat to consider. A darkness so loud that deafness couldn’t keep it out. Yet they are deaf! For the sweetness of silence eludes their ears; a polite, warm sweetness garish noises have masked. The din created by their voices further enhancing the belief of deafness. For, don’t they stop and ponder when they hear themselves?

        Eureka! I think I find my answers here. Its not the eye, ear or tongue but the mind- that unknown entity responsible. So do I quote a friend here? “Butter has replaced those gray cells; off-white with a tinge of yellow.” But did mama churn it out or was the contamination elsewhere? Pictures of master and slave run through me like a flickering movie reel. Click, click, whirr! An eerie silence, pierced by the projector, screaming to be freed.

         The human slave attempting to flee his master- the mind. But isn’t the mind meant to rule? Then the running? The constant leaps, in vain, to escape? Why?

          Rebellion- the most enduring of all human characters. Probably the most endearing too. Thank slavery! It’s kept the rebel alive and safe, surviving the ages. Or is slavery really the surrogate mother of all rebellion? Is rebellion but not the recoil of a tied down spring? Freedom would not be, but for the shackles. To rephrase the famous lines- Man was indeed born free but chained so he’d always be!

           But has the battle been lost? The rebel spark so dim that a burnout is its only fate? The stagnant mind- perfect medium for the growth of distorted ideologies. “The Buddha is smiling” as saffron, green and blue; three colours of a flag stand in awkward salute to the white in the middle. Can symbols of the ages withstand another onslaught? Or will they represent new-age vandalism henceforth?

            Communalism, terrorism, war- all terms sired by decay of thought. Who’s responsible? The men in office, the one’s with the so-called power? No! The power lies with us, the power of thought. An individual power which once unleashed is irrepressible. Is it asking too much to spare a moment and ponder, question and look for the answers? Is it asking too much to take a step forward in friendship and brotherhood? So what if he didn’t step up in reply? The distance still decreased by a step, didn’t it? And he’ll step up too; faith engenders faith; ditto hatred. The choice is ours!

              For long we’ve been divided by colours, by tongues, by geography, by history. We’ve been divided by the way we look up to the heavens and by the way we ask Him for His mercy. Stop and see! It isn’t about ‘how’, it is about ‘why’. That we all look up to Him is reason enough for unity. Let us leave the ‘hows’ and ‘whens’ to the individual and respect his freedom to choose. And as individuals ourselves let us not just blindly accept someone else’s preaching but exert our conscience and our will to choose life ourselves.