Wednesday, November 15, 2017

Footnote 9 (loneliness)

I am sharing this comment on a post on loneliness of a fb friend:

Many times I am unable to convert aloofness into solitude, the heart refuses to get regulated by reason leading to the feeling of helplessness and intense depression that causes irreparable emotional and intellectual losses to me and consequently to my readers and students. Being alone is blessing in disguise if one is able to convert loneliness into creative solitude, otherwise it is self-detrimental of curse. But one must and has to sail through. A young Indian revolutionary of anti-colonial movement era, Bhagat Singh (Like Karl Marx, such revolutionaries are born once in history) while writing about early Indian revolutionaries he made a classic, inspirational statement, "Revolutionaries fought for the oppressed, because they had to." I tell my self in such situations, 'I have to.' Such sentences of a young boy terrorized the mighty colonial rulers to an extent that they found his existence on the earth, dangerous for their existence and killed him with the might of the colonial state machinery. But by then he had become the idea and ideas don't die they spread and create history. The authority wields fear, ideas wield terror. The word Bhagat Singh became synonym to the word revolution. The entire country mourned his martyrdom, had it stood with his organization and ideas when they were bringing about the revolution, the history would have been drastically different. Probably he was much ahead of the level and form of the social consciousness. Sorry Com Andrew Taylor, It was intended to be a Kafkaesque short comment but like my heart, my pen too is a vagabond. As Marx wrote in 'A Contribution to the Critique of Hegel's Philosophy of Rights' (1844), "To be radical is to grasp things by the root. But, for man, the root is man himself." The moments of feeling alone drive me to harsh introspection, some times it goes back up to early childhood. That helps to conclude that I am not rich or big, probably didn't intend to be but have lived an honest (at times cynically) life with dignity without begging, stealing and kneeling, not even before my father and broke the financial dependence on him at 18. I tell myself that as an ordinary 'good' human being, I too have committed mistakes, either due to the error in judgement or in the heat of the moment, have regretted and felt ashamed. Shame is a revolutionary feeling.

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