Ponderings on the Immortal Insanity of Love and Truth ....
The eternal madness of Love and Truth is better than the escapist madness of hypocrisy ....
Commitment and Determination as Madness - Fairness of Purpose ....
The Example of Great Martyrs of Indian Freedom Struggle ....
The eternal madness of Love and Truth is better than the escapist madness of hypocrisy ....
Madness
The immortal insanity of
Love and Truth
Gets projected as Immaturity or Madness
By practical escapists,
Who fail to cast and mould It
To their desires or
To their misconception of
Benefit or Advantage or Goodness.
God bless their good health
And their sanity !
They are on a shoreless voyage,
Drifting away from themselves
Into madness called hypocrisy –
Ugly when open,
Misleading when concealed,
Dangerous always,
More so, when intoxicated by
Acquired authorities,
Typically known as Power.
- Vanita Thakkar (06-07th April, 2009)
Reflections ....
- Madness literally would mean an unstable mental condition. However, due to the discrepancies that tend to creep into civilized social life on a mass scale, in the name of traditions or behaviours that go out of tune with the dynamics of changes / progress with time, circumstances and necessities of prevailing ecosystems, certain abnormalities assume the label of normality and vice versa.
- A book of parables and poems by the great Khalil Gibran is titled - The Madman. It begins with this interesting parable, in which he describes how he became a madman .... He says he woke up one day, long before many gods were born, from a deep sleep and found that all his masks were stolen. The seven masks that he said he had fashioned and worn in seven lives were stolen. He says, he ran maskless through the crowded streets shouting, "Thieves, thieves, the cursed thieves !!" Men and women laughed at him and some ran into their houses out of fear of him. And when he reached the market place, a youth standing on a house-top cried, "He is a madman." He says, as he looked up to behold the youth, the sun kissed his own naked face for the first time and that his soul was inflamed with love for the sun and he no longer wanted any masks. He cried, as if in a trance, "Blessed, blessed are the thieves that stole my masks." And thus he became a madman. Then he writes, "And I have found both freedom and safety in my madness; the freedom of loneliness and the safety from being understood, for those who understand us enslave something in us. But let me not be too proud of my safety. Even a Thief in a jail is safe from another thief."
Commitment as Madness ....
Firm commitment is also looked upon as madness. But the fairness of purpose is important here.
Here, I am reminded of the great martyrs who laid down the lives for noble causes, such as the freedom struggle of India. Two days are celebrated as Shaheed Divas (Martyr's Day) in India to gratefully remember supreme scarifies of martyrs of Indian Freedom Struggle. 30th January is the martyrdom day of Mahatma Gandhi. The Mahatma was assassinated on 30th January, 1948 when he was returning from his evening prayers. 23rd March is the Martyrdom Day of three young Freedom Fighters of India - Shaheed Bhagat Singh, Shaheed Rajguru and Shaheed Sukhdev, who were hanged to death on 23rd March, 1931 for killing the English policeman who was behind the death of the great Indian Freedom Fighter Lala Lajpat Rai ....
One who truly loves his / her mother never even thinks of insulting anybody else's mother. So it is with one's love for one's motherland and one's religion. We need to recognize the ugly face of nasty power games - non-violence is not synonymous to cowardice, nor is a thoughtless, greed-inspired act of brutality or crookedness anywhere close to being bravery or manliness.
There can be no justifications for wrong means adopted for fulfilling "right" goals. A thief has the good intentions of making himself and his family prosperous. That does not justify his wrong actions. Colonialism was inspired by "good intentions" of serving one's country at the cost of destroying the identity and fundamental human rights of another country / countries .... Means and ends cannot be separated. Wrong means adopted for "right intentions" is a lame, and on a large scale, a dangerous and cruel excuse.
There is hardly anything "fair" in and about wars and anything "unfair" cannot be love. We need to recognize and understand the absurdity and reckless incivility in the thought - "Everything is fair in love and war."
© 2021 Vanita Thakkar
