|
|
 |
 |
| Sunday, 6 January 2002 |
 |
|
 |
Features |  |
| News Business Features Editorial
|
'Societies carry within it roots and results of battle' Address by H. E. Gopalkrishna Gandhi, High Commissioner for India at the convocation ceremony of the University of Peradeniya, Saturday, 15 December 2001. Mr. Chancellor, Mr. Vice-Chancellor, members of the Faculty, Professor Ashton, Dr. Deraniyagala, Assistant High Commissioner for India, Mr. Malhotra, graduands, Ladies and Gentlemen. It is an inestimable honour for me to be present here today and to accept in humility a Doctorate honoris causa in letters. I would like to thank the University for the bestowal of this honour most sincerely. I dedicate these words in acceptance to Ian Goonetilleke, the University of Peradeniya's former librarian and scholar-extraordinary who, even in retirement, continues to be a font of intellectual vigour and aesthetic discrimination. Also to Thomas Abraham, India's former High Commissioner in Sri Lanka under whom I served from 1978 to 1982 and to his wife, the historical Meera Abraham, with both of whom I have spent many hours on this Campus. They too, from their retreat in Kerala, remain a source of much-needed atma-bala. Revisiting Peradeniya, where I have many friends, from whom I have learnt a great deal, is a cherished opportunity and experience. Integrity and intelligence combine but rarely. They have, in a friend, here in Kandy. Leela Bibile's goodness is not naive; her compassion, like a surgeon's knife, proceeds unsentimentally. She told me the other day: "Each one of us has battles, big or small. The least we can do is to show understanding and, if possible, extend some help." The comment was made almost as an aside. But it made me think. Those in personal or professional difficulty are in battle, of course. But, the more fortunate, contented and well-adjusted among us are in battle too, if only with the poor quality of their sleep, their lumbago or their fears of losing what they cherish. Let us not make light of health and familial happiness. They can make or unmake life. And everyone can make mistakes of judgment, mistakes which ensnare us in yet more battles. Success is, ever so often, kin to failure; visible success to hidden failure. Success enjoys no auto-immunity either. Doctors succumb to disease; judges can land in jail; priests stand in need of absolution. Each category of people, therefore, each professional group, carries within it the roots - and results - of battle. What is true of individuals and professions is true, too, of societies. Those societies with a high per capita income, an impressive telephone, TV, car computer ratio per thousand of population can and do have their battles, serious battles. Battles, which arise perhaps from the very situations they take pride in. There is, despite their plenty, an insufficiency in those societies, an inner turmoil. Else why would the Beatles have taken to Transcendental Meditation, Cassius Clay become Muhammad Ali, or people in Western Europe and the USA flock to see and hear His Holiness the Dalai Lama? Why would cults with dissonant agenda and controversial techniques arise in China and Japan? Because those societies - in many ways better placed than ours - have their own battles, inner and outer. Just as we do. So, we are an embattled planet. Some of us show the battle-scars, others hold the ache deep inside. What does all this, you may well ask, have to do with an acceptance speech at a Convocation? Should I not be talking about education, distance-learning, information technology, the values of a university, research, employment and such worthy subjects? I can only respond by saying that when a University invites an Indian to speak and gives him a tabula rasa for this theme, the University takes a risk. He can be expected to - and perhaps forgiven for - bringing out of his bag an assortment of very Indian cultural wares, motifs and metaphors. Battles and battlements are among these. Most Indians are influenced in less or more degree by images of two battles: the one depicted in the celebrated epic of that name, Mahabharata and the other, both violent and redemptive, waged by Emperor Asoka in Kalinga, I will not go into whether the Mahabharata war is of the stuff of legend or history. Nor into the subtleties of the Kalinga war, on which Professor Sudarshan Seneviratne of this University has done much work. For millions upon millions of us those wars are as real as today, and as palpable. Most of us know, in close detail, the epic battle at Kurukshetra, its phases of doubt, resolve, stratagem, excitement, gore, anguish and pain. The Asokan war, recently done into (and therefore re-mythologised by) a song-studded extravaganza on celluloid, is less widely known. The war, nonetheless is, acknowledged as a millennial landmark. Far more important than knowledge of those battles, is, however, the influence - inchoate but real - of the quiddity or the thingness of those battles. Arjuna's doubt and Asoka's remorse have entered our collective sub-conscious much more than Socrates, Homer, Dante or Ibsen have permeated Europe, much more than Shakespeare has influenced the British, or Robert Frost the Americans. These wars have meant much more to India than knowledge of the Crusades or the Hundred Years' War can ever mean to the western world. The reason lies not just in the compelling power of those epic transactions of Bharat. It lies, rather, in the fact that those events resonate in the minds and hearts of our people, pulsating in our own doubts and in our own remorse, every single day, every hour and (for quote Kipling) every "unforgiving minute." Given that we are all embattled and will always be, our inheritance of that 'battle-knowledge' of yuddha-jnana ought to have been put to better use. This is where, I think, we have failed ourselves. And by 'we' I mean not just the citizens of the Republic of India but the people of the larger India world inhabited by Hindus, Muslims, Sikhs, Christians, Buddhists, Jains, Parsis and also agnostics and atheists. Where does that failure lie? It lies, I believe, in our persistent inability to follow the injunction of our great Teachers that our svabhava must move into the higher processes of svadharma because if it does not, it goes coarse. Our svabhava is innately wholesome but when the world impacts on it, it gets rough, calloused, insensitive. Children, like creatures of the wild, have the purest svabhava. Some tribal communities retain that guileless svabhava. But natural instincts of survival and self-defence acquire competitive teeth, fangs, claws, horns and minds in us humans as we advance form youth to mid-age. And when that happens collectively, we debase our collective svabhava. Only semantics would ask 'Who determines svadharma?' or 'What if my understanding of dharma differs from yours?' They have a point; but only a limited one. No one in the world except the most bigoted or brainwashed, had the slightest hesitation to decry the events of September 11, 2001. The world coalesced in horror at what it beheld. But, who does not - Americans included - feel for the innocent people killed, maimed or rendered homeless in Afghanistan? Another friend with strong Peradeniya links - Dr. Mark Amerasinghe - recently re-introduced me to Marcus Aurelius. As that philosopher-king tells us, anger has its causes; it has its consequences too. The causes often pale before the consequences. The line where anger is crossed, exists; it is not constant, it shifts with each circumstance; but it is there. The Bhagavad Gita, which is a part of the Mahabharata tells us with psychoanalytic precision where and how that line is crossed; from thwarted will or desire arises anger, from anger comes, in quick succession, disorientation, disequilibrium, loss of reasoning and from loss of reasoning, results ruination. Speaking confessionally for myself, I know that pattern works only too well and too dangerously. But all of us - even the most unprovokable of us - know how it works collectively. So there is no need, really, for semantics on what constitutes the inner monitor; it is there. In so many religiously unostentatious but ethically strong persons in Sri Lanka I have seen that monitor working. The late Bishop Lakshman Wickremesinghe, meditation teacher and dear friend the late Godwin Samararatne, the late Neelan Thiruchelvam, and the gentle banker C. Sankarakumaran. Be it in matters small or large, we need to employ that monitor. I will conclude by saying that the one battle over all battles which we in India, in Sri Lanka and indeed in all of South Asia are engaged in, is the battle for space - physical, cultural, spiritual and, of course, professional and economic space. The public bus is our vehicle par excellence. If we are all to travel in it, we have to make room in it for those wanting to come in. Our coarsened savabhava may impel us to keep others out; but it would be our svadharma not to do so. And it would be the transport operators' svadharma to put as many buses on the road as are needed for all to travel. Making space, of course, is more than a matter of admittance; it is one of partnership. The University of Peradeniya like all enlightened houses of learning has made that space without hesitation in a coalescence of instinct and duty. That it has included an itinerant envoy in its space bespeaks yet another attribute: generosity. I accept that space in the name of the bonds that link India and Sri Lanka. The bonds of self-doubt such as Arjuna's and of remorse such as Asoka's, as much as those of our joint journey as neighbours. More particularly, I accept this Doctorate honoris causa, in the name of an extraordinary manifestation of our shared history: in the name of the plantation workers of Sri Lanka who first brought me, more than twenty years ago, to this beautiful isle and whose battles are an epic in themselves. An epic which, written one day in their own hand, will receive the recognition deserves - not for their sake, but for ours. I thank the University of Peradeniya, once again, for the high honour bestowed upon me today. |
|
News | Business | Features
| Editorial | Security Produced by Lake House |
