Within the petty confines of discourse and largely
beyond, I have enjoyed that very expensive fortitude of giving indiscriminate
preference to those provocative subjects which arouse widespread public
controversy. And I don’t esteem that someone else of my travailing scholarship
would accuse me of academic heresy. Unless he won’t mind if I address such a
profane accusation to Saint Peter’s Hall at Oxford for cross-examination. It is
not my enterprise to pity or to console anybody who is injured in the course of
my discourse contentions. Sometimes, I am a victim myself. Self pity is an
irreparable damage to the procreation and nurturing of a commonwealth of
sagehood.
Because all human beings love to be free and
consequently make their respective choices, the history of mankind (from
creation to present date) has been plagued by the incessant fight for freedoms
of one kind or the other. Nations upon nations have split to independent
fragments. From time immemorial, the citizens of uncounted nations have
complained of sundry persecutions, and fled from their places of origin to
every corner of inhabited earth for the sake of their freedoms and choices. Tribes
and villages have clashed, extended families and homes have settled their
differences over the table of discord, and separated in order to safeguard
their freedoms and choices. To all freedom fighters stretching from modernity
to antiquity, I give fair quarter, and demonstrate my untimely departure, for
they have all failed to fight for those very heart-racking freedoms and choices
which have held the human race in ignorant captivity, and to breaking point:
mental freedoms and choices.
At this juncture, I am compelled to settle to a seemingly
controversial conclusion – that freedom is an individual’s state of mind. If
you are in prison and believe that you are not there, you won’t be there. Neither
Nelson Mandela nor Mahatma Gandhi (when imprisoned), believed that they were in
prison. Neither did Sir Thomas More at the guillotine. Their bodies were there,
but their souls were out in the vineyards enjoying their freedoms. We claim to
fight for our freedoms and choices everyday, but everyday, we voluntarily
stretch our hands into handcuffs thereby depriving ourselves of our very
precious freedoms. We believe that we make our choices ourselves, but different
people make them for us for their selfish interests. How pathetic!
I will now commit myself to entertain two crucial
examples and close my contention cartes sur table. Between two people
who choose to go to different denominational churches, I don’t see any
difference. Both of them have no choice. They are boarding different vehicles
to the same destination. But between someone who goes to church and someone who
does not go there at all, I see a difference. Both of them have choices. Along
the same margin, between two people who get married, I don’t see any
difference. Marriage is marriage. None is better than the other, and none is
worse than the other. But between a married man or woman and a celibate, I see
a difference. They have made their choices. Either you are in or you are out.
There is no room for compromise.
When someone with whom you claim to have become one
(by virtue of a protracted contract signed at court) asks you every morning
where you are going, and every evening where you are coming from, who do you
think you are to that person? Yet you sit high in public places and boast yourself
of a free person who has made the right choice widely admired by friends and
relatives. You raving domestic slave! I decree today that for no reason
whatsoever should anybody’s freedoms and choices infringe on those of another
person to their peck and peril. If they do, then, that individual (no matter
his or her learning and social standing) has violated the Universal Declaration
of Human Rights; is an international criminal, and should be sentenced to The
Hague.
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