04 September, 2010

Not ‘Retro’ spects, but ‘Pro’ spects…………(G F Xavier)

Those scary nights the Srilankan aerial warfare dropped down fire to their homes. The ‘Tamil belt’ in its entirety was blasted to debris in a minute’s time. Lakhs of people were flagrantly exposed to the brutal exchange between army and the militia ‘Tigers’. Crowds in large numbers fled to other countries as fugitives. India turned to be the largest recipient to them. They are settled in almost one hundreds and twenty camps in different parts of Tamilnadu. I claim having a very personal experience with their multitude of torments.

          It was pitch dark when I set my foot inside the campground. That night I enjoyed the rare privilege of owning a kerosene lamp. Hundreds of cabins, each accommodating an average of six persons, serves as their homes. They never had eyes to carry the thoughts back to the grey cataclysmic episodes in Sri Lanka. A comprehensive vanishing of their past life occurred as they seldom nurtured the glimpses of destruction of their home town, the merciless slaying of their young boys, the swinish deflowering of their girls ….. Though the partners and estranged kith and kin live in either shores, never they had the joy of meeting even by surface mail. A definition of refugee, which I heard elsewhere, flashed in my mind. “A refugee is the one who is deprived materially, who lost identity, who has limited ways of expressions, bears a wounded dignity and owns a disturbed relationship”.

           The absence of lavatory to answer the call of nature piqued me to the nerves, that morning. A land of shrubs was pointed out and said. “The other side is set apart for women”. The ‘I’ in me shattered down to the ground. The lone hand pump served as the only recourse to bathe for more than a thousand people. As men and women shared the same spot as washroom, I was little shy to expose my bare body to that public. In times of eventuality men and women get used to anything. I watched with unconcern and wanted to flee away form those desolate flock. For me fresh air turned to be the dire need of the moment as I felt suffocating as if there is no oxygen but only some fowl smell. As all shared the same necessities, the disparity between beasts and human beings were reduced for the first time in my life I saw the truth of being insecure and unwanted. How those people of high standards crashed down to a state which run short of minimum necessities. Their whole life seemed a tapestry of lost comfort and unwelcome fate.

          Molar Devi and her three daughters encountered their first rupture as they boarded a boat in Indian shore. To traverse the sea the number was very high and her husband and sixteen year old boy could not catch the boat, as the preference was laid on women. Now after twelve years she doesn’t feel any frustration to narrate the murder of husband by army. Her daughters have the good expectation of fetching a job in their motherland with all degrees they earned here. Still they await the coupling with their lost brother. They have buds but to flower it in their return to their nation it is not an isolated case but all and sundry in the camp stove hard to pas degrees in Indian universities, as they never wasted their stay in other land. With the fruitful stay of past twelve years in India, they wait for the ample opportunity to step back to their soil. The new generation with vigour and rigour learned and grew comprehensively, leaving no room to doodle in their life. It is their peculiarity that they can only live by glancing at the future.

          Occasionally the local mob disallows a free life outside the camp. Even the camp came under stone pelting and threats from local leaders. They are on no occasion encouraged to excel in any field, but still they are not defeated. They suffer for meaning in life. Obvious goals added significance to embarrassment and it serves as an inevitable part of life. Subsistence comprehends in torture. They have in hand the matching outlook of Mohammed Kaif, the Indian cricketer, who, when all the top order batsmen were our chasing a mammoth total in Lords for the Nat West Trophy final, kept cool and led India to cruise the otherwi8se unnavigatable shore of 325 runs. No one can be defeated if she/he has distinctly located her/his goal of consummation. All refugees life for the future and they live, sleep and eat for dreams.

          “He who has a ‘why’ to live for can bear with almost any ‘how’”.  – Nietzche.

          There is a gulf in every person’s life, a vacuum which separates one from that what ought to be accomplished and what one is now. There will be
Tension, misery, persecution, etc. of present days but the one who climbs over this placing her /his dreams as the end will be victorious.

          Logo therapy underpins all these definitely. “It focuses on the future that is to say on the assignments and meaning to be fulfilled by the patient in the future. Man is able to live and even to die for the sake of ideals and values”. As per the polls conducted in France quoted in Victor E Frankl’s book “89% of the people polled admitted that man needs ‘something’ for the sake of which to live. Moreover 61% conceded that there was something or someone in their lives for whose sake they were even ready to die”. “The will to meaning is in most people Fact and no Faith.

          Israel waited in Babylonia for seventy years before their dream for freedom was actualized. Near the sheep gate in Jerusalem, in one of the porticoes of the river Bethzatha, a paralytic waited for 38 years with the dream of a cure. Its now long years since Lankan guests in our land waiting the dawn of returning, the end of all their nightmares. It teaches a lesson. Gaze at the future and fine a will to meaning in life. Let the present time reduce the vacuum between the colourful future and the days of drought or pain. They reserve no room for retrospection in their life as they have only toils to reminisce. Srilankan Tamils prefer prospection, marching forward and not a retro march.

          “Whatever you can do or dream you can, begin it, boldness has genius, power and magic in it”. – Goethe

          Dreams are my pillows on which I rest my head. I fetch seeds to plant on this ground when my dreams come true. What I gain now be manifested when my future of dreams dawns. – G. F. Xavier

          NB: Remember with gratitude JRS (Jesuit Refugee Service) and OFFERR (Organization for Ealem Refugee Rehabilitation) who facilitated this episode of experience. The quotes are excerpts from the book ‘Man’s Search of Meaning’ by Victor E Frankl. 

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