Some men are like that only…

 

Like almost a ghost, Kobad Ghandy has risen out of the past. As a reminder. A reminder of a time and an ethos that prompted men of all backgrounds (in his case an exceedingly advantageous one) to give up everything for the sake of something that they believed in. It is true that the revolutionary bug bit many of Ghandy’s contemporaries but only a handful remained faithful to what they believed in as a hot blooded teenager. Mark Twain had once remarked that “If you are not a revolutionary by the time you are twenty, you don’t have a heart; if you remain one when you are thirty, you don’t have a mind”. In cases of men like Ghandy, Twain would have accepted the exception.

A man coming from a rich family, studying in Doon school, higher studies in London, coming back to India to fight for the upliftment of the oppressed masses, marrying a like minded woman and deciding not to have children so as not to get distracted from the cause – his life story reads like that of a revolutionary romance and would find echoes in many places and many times, most however in the past.

His life story also reads as a reminder of how some lives are (and can be) led and how some men (and women) strive to live for something higher than themselves. Compared to most of our ambitions today (including mine), their life-force and motives for life seem impossibly inaccessible and almost an object of awe. We stand in awe mainly because we can never even begin to think of replicating their way of life – firmly ensconced as we are in our single minded devotion to climbing the ladder of corporate life, in search of the best paycheck to buy our peace of mind.

That is why men like Ghandy, men like Che seem like men out of a past – a past where rebellion was not only in rock ballads but on the streets, not only in books but in the mind directing the arm. A past that retains its romance today, when we look back with rose tinted glasses; a past, however, that has lost its relevance for most of us today – mainly I feel because we, (starting with our fathers) compromised, choosing safety and conventionality over fighting in the name of some nebulous ideal. We compromised when we told ourselves that watching TV in an AC cooled room was more rewarding than living in the jungles in the danger of sudden death.

But let us blame nobody. We choose our destinies and the way we would like to lead our lives. But man is essentially an animal and finds solace in herds. It’s the renegade then, who, commands our respect and awe even though we know that they are an enemy to the way we lead our lives.

I am no ideologue of the Naxalite variety. I find their basic demands appealing but not the way they look at implementing it. In answer to the negatives of today, they proclaim a state that would tilt the scale in the exact opposite direction without taking into account the positives gained under the present system. I do not believe that should they ever gain supreme power, the government would get any better. It would be corruption and oppression by another name. It’s the Marxists worldwide who have killed Marx.

But that should not detract ourselves from the man himself. He stands for the best ideals of the Naxalite movement and has stayed true to it. It is of course a given that except a handful of us, we would wilt away in face of so much demands made on us when there is no clear ‘advantage’ accruing to us for all the hardships.

Maybe that’s where our tragedy lies. Our sense of cost benefit analysis has been honed to such an extent in the world we inhabit today, we cannot see beyond a few years without counting the costs and the benefits we hope to get. Everything we interact with simply reinforces that this is the only way to live and the best option to survive in todays increasingly smaller, yet lonelier world.

That is why men like Ghandy rise like a dinosaur. We can only pick at his surface and wonder at him. The ability to truly understand how he lived or thought is lost to us.

 

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