Tolerance - A Gandhian View

January 30 is the death anniversary of, arguably, the most quoted and least followed man in modern history.

The reason Mahatma Gandhi was shot this day, in 1948, by a Hindu extremist Nathuram Godse, was that Gandhi's tolerance for Muslims was unacceptable to the assassin.

Godse and his ilk felt that Gandhi was somehow responsible for the partitioning of India into India and Pakistan.

They felt that Gandhi and the new leaders of Independent India – which was barely six months old then – had betrayed the people who wanted a united India with Hindus and Muslims together. They felt that Gandhi’s continued talk of ‘ahimsa’ (non-violence) weakened the people’s power to show anger.

With some eerie premonition, just two days prior to his assassination, Gandhi said, “If I am to die by the bullet of a mad man, I must do so smiling. There must be no anger within me. God must be in my heart and on my lips”.

The mad man later defended himself in court with these words: "...it was not so much the Gandhian Ahimsa teachings that were opposed to by me and my group, but Gandhiji, while advocating his views, always showed or evinced a bias for Muslims, prejudicial and detrimental to the Hindu Community and its interests.

“I have fully described my point of view hereafter in detail and have quoted numerous instances, which unmistakably establish how Gandhiji became responsible for a number of calamities which the Hindu Community had to suffer and undergo."

Very often, the cause of an assassin seems paramount, only to himself. His focus would be only on what he thinks is unjust. And his biggest weapon would be ‘anger’.

And we can see here that Godse was so wrapped up in anger - seeing Gandhi being tolerant towards the demands of Mohammed Ali Jinnah, the founder of Pakistan – that he failed to see the larger picture of all those bigger powers at play, or of those extenuating circumstances that overwhelm individual influence. Even if the individual is as great as Gandhi.

In Richard Attenborough’s Oscar winning movie ‘Gandhi’, there is a scene at Jinnah’s house, where the Indian leaders discuss resistance to a new British law. It legislates arresting, without warrant, anyone possessing material considered seditious.

Gandhi says, “Our resistance must be active and provocative. I want to embarrass all those who wish to treat us as slaves…. I want to change their minds. Not kill them for weakness we all possess.”

His suggestions seem completely defiant, yet absolutely necessary.  He wants to mark the day the law comes into effect as a special day. “Make that a day of prayer and fasting.”

Jinnah asks, “You mean a general strike?”

Gandhi replies, “I mean a day of prayer and fasting. Of course, no work will be done. No buses. No trains. No factories. No administration. The country would stop.”

His attitude of non-violent resistance, as we can see here, exasperated the British to such extremes that they had to give in. 

He showed us that peaceful resistance and peaceful coexistence are both possible. And that one can protest against injustice without resorting to arms.

His preaching and his practice of love for humanity is worthy of emulation at a pragmatic level in everyday application.

“Anger and intolerance are the enemies of correct understanding,” Gandhi said. And shunning these two, and bettering our understanding, is the greatest tribute we can give to his memory.

Brilliant Biopics against Biographical Books

“I like solving problems, Commander. And Enigma is the most difficult problem in the world,” says Alan Turing.

“Enigma isn't difficult. It's impossible. The Americans, the Russians, the French, the Germans, everyone thinks Enigma is unbreakable” says Commander Denniston.

“Good. Let me try then. And we'll know for sure, won't we?”

It is not these adamant words of Professor Turing that confound the commander. It is the other ones, “I am the greatest mathematician in the world,” that do.

Eccentric as professors come, Alan Turing from Cambridge is determined to help decipher the codes of Nazi Germany – which Nazis decrypt using Enigma machines - on his own machine to help Britain win the war.

Watching this scene, and many others, in the gripping biopic The Imitation Game this week, I felt Benedict Cumberbatch deserves an Oscar for playing the quirky professor to the hilt.

But among his competitors is another Oscar nominee Eddie Redmayne who plays another Professor in another biopic, A Theory of Everything.  Eddie plays Stephen Hawking.

So, among this year’s Oscar nominees are these two films and two actors - who are playing two professors; with both professors from Cambridge.

In fact, Stephen Hawking is still there. He is the current Director of Research at the Centre for Theoretical Cosmology in the University of Cambridge.

If it were not for these biopics, I wonder how many of us would actually learn about, and learn from, these greats that history bestowed us.

I remember someone saying that, after watching the movie Gandhi (1982) at a cinema in Poland, he overheard these words: “Wow! What a movie! If we didn’t know it was a movie, we would have thought that such a man had really existed!”

That could be an anomaly. But the amazing power of a ‘motion picture’ in conveying inspiration from those lives that changed our world cannot be denied.

And the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences deserves praise for recognizing movies of this genre.

  

The machines Alan Turing built – whatever his sexual orientation was – were amazing precursors to computers.

If he were alive, I wonder what Turing would have said of the astonishing processing speed of today’s supercomputer Tianhe-2, at 33.86-petaflops! One petaflop, by the way, is equal to a quadrillion (thousand trillion) floating point operations per second (FLOPS).

The insights into Time-and-Space that Stephen Hawking gave us – despite the Amyotrophic Lateral Sclerosis (ALS), which gradually paralysed him– are considered monumental contributions to interdisciplinary studies of general theory of relativity and quantum mechanics.

Many in the West would have learnt more of politics in Asia from biopics like Lawrence of Arabia (1962), ‘Gandhi (1982) and The Last Emperor (1987), than from their history textbooks.

Similarly, many occidentals must have learnt more about the West from movies like Schindler’s List (1993) and Lincoln (2012) than from their school teachers.

Biopics that won Oscars for Best Picture, which portrayed a range of inspiring lives, were on scientists like The Story of Louis Pasteur (1936), mathematicians like A Beautiful Mind (2001), writers like The Life of Emile Zola (1937), activists like Erin Brockovich (2000), political leaders like Disraeli (1930), military generals like  Patton (1970), music composers like Amadeus (1984), entertainers like Coal Miner's Daughter (1980), and sports people like Raging Bull (1980).

And biopic genre of movies today is what biographical literature in books was in the past.

Perseverant Kurds - The Mountain People

“We have no friends but the mountains”.

So say the disappointed Kurds who, for almost a century now, were hoping for a land they can call their own.

Said to be around 40 million strong, they are from the rough geographic region currently spread in the countries of Turkey, Syria, Iraq, Iran and Armenia, and also in the diaspora.

The blurb on a book I have with me,  titled ‘No Friends but the Mountains – The Tragic History of the Kurds’, says: “…split between five countries and welcome in none, constantly caught up in regional rivalries, repeatedly spurred on to rebellion, and then abandoned by the Great Powers, for decades the Kurds have known little but disaster….”

But now, with the increased role of Kurds in the recent geo-political turbulence of Syria and Iraq – particularly, of their Peshmerga, the military forces of Iraqi Kurdistan - is there hope, once again?

Iraqi Kurdistan, an autonomous region in the northern Iraq, with capital city Erbil, has its own President.  It also has its MPs sitting in Iraq’s Parliament.

With the very powerful and strategic role Masoud Barzani, its current President, is now playing, I was not surprised that he was fourth in TIME magazine’s the short-list for Person of the Year 2014.

In June 2014, according to TIME, “After Iraqi forces fled the lightening advance of ISIS forces, Barzani dispatched fighters to capture Kirkuk, the oil-rich city claimed by both Kurds and Sunni Arabs”.

He took control of Kirkuk and stopped sending oil south! And he started distributing it abroad.

But with US troops coming down to fight ISIS, alongside his Peshmerga, he was under pressure – from US and from his own region’s bankers – to temporarily rejoin Iraq.

Probably disappointed, he signed a pact on 2 December 2014 to send oil to Baghdad instead of aboard.

It pacified the new Iraqi government. But the disputes are still not over yet.

Yesterday,  on 15 January, Asharq Al-Awsat, reported that, “A political delegation from the autonomous Kurdistan region in Iraq will meet with the central Baghdad government “soon” in order resolve a number of disputes between both sides”.

Though the ‘soon’ is unclear, and though the ‘disputes’ they will discuss are clear, what is clear is this. That they are not happy.

In Iraq, even during the Baath Party administration of  1970s and 1980s, this region was called the "Kurdish Autonomous Region”.

If we look back a little more we can see that the hopes of a "Kurdistan" were very high after the First World War. With the defeat of the Ottoman Empire, the victorious Western allies had even made a provision for a Kurdish state in the 1920 Treaty of Sevres.

But within three years, Mustafa Kemal Ataturk founded modern Turkey, and a new 1923 Treaty of Lausanne was signed. It left Kurds once again with a minority status in their respective countries.

“Kurds are the largest stateless minority in the world”, says an article in the Foreign Policy Journal of April 2011.

Well, there cannot be any mirages in mountains. But the dream of Kurdistan seems as elusive as the mirage to these people.

Maybe they are right in saying, “We have no friends but the mountains.”

Dangerous Lives of Female Spies

One man’s meat is another man’s poison, they say.

Oftentimes, one country’s hero becomes another country’s villain.

Stories of spies and secret agents, therefore, are intriguing to all of us.

Listening to a gripping BBC documentary this week, on Noor Inayat Khan, I was once again drawn into thoughts about the dangerous lives these female spies chose to live.

Fluent in French, Noor Inayat Khan was a wartime British secret agent sent into Nazi-occupied France by Special Operations Executive (SOE) in early 1940s.

She was born in Moscow to an Indian father and an American mother, and was a direct descendant of Tipu Sultan, the 18th century Muslim ruler of Mysore.

Her father was a musician and Sufi teacher who moved to London, and then to Paris, where Noor was educated.

That explains her French.  But just, look at her. 

She wrote children’s' stories, studied Sufism, got a degree in child psychology, and even played the sitar.

But when France fell to the Nazis in November 1940, she escaped to England and joined WAAF (Women's Auxiliary Air Force).

Trained as a radio operator – with Morse code and all those works - she was sent to join the 'Prosper' resistance network in Paris, under the codename 'Madeleine'.

Her communication headquarters was, however, raided by the Nazis.  She avoided detection. But was later betrayed, and ruthlessly interrogated.

Without revealing sensitive information, despite extreme odds, she managed to escape several times before finally being shackled and transferred to Dachau Concentration camp.

Here, at this camp, she was brutally tortured and finally executed in 1944. She was just 30.

She was awarded posthumously the George Cross, and a Statue of her, now stands in London.

Tortured and shot by one country. Decorated and honoured by another.  

And we must wonder now, what gave woman like Noor such courage and confidence?

Is it some horrible blackmail, some threat to family, or some lure of money? Nothing seems plausible.

We see in these spies a strange passion to serve the country they owed allegiance to. Temporarily.

When caught, they became double agents. When caught again, they became triple agents.

But they kept evolving, and kept playing roles that were too many and too complicated to play by even an accomplished actor. And that too, in terrifying circumstances.

An enormous amount of grit and fortitude was needed I think, years ago, when communication and transportation was pitiable.

And when to be a woman in a ruthless world of men was by no means easy.

But Noor was just one among hundreds of women who chose to live on the edge.

Krystyna Skarbek, the Polish spy was an excellent skier. She put her skill to good use when Poland was occupied by the Nazis. She transported information back and forth from Poland to Hungary through the mountains.

Nancy Wake developed a spy-network in France so strong that she became the prime target for Gestapo. Nicknamed White Mouse for her elusiveness, she was a lethal combination of femininity and brutality.

Mata Hari. How can I not mention this greatest female spy? Born in Netherlands, and initially married to an Indonesian, she went around the world changing men, and changing allegiances with equal ease.  But finally, accused of spying for the Germans, she was executed in 1917.

Females or males, what’s in a gender? These spies were all doing what the other countries did not want them to do in theirs. Dangerously.

President's Prayer. People's Perspectives.

The world was getting ready for its annual indulgence in pomp and pageantry, romp and revelry, to mark the coming of New Year.

And in the country of Sierra Leone, its President called for prayer and fasting as they all begin the New Year.

Needless to say, people being people, and opinions being opinions, there was an immediate outpouring of diverse arguments.

From heartily appreciating him for looking at God, to harshly criticizing him for abdicating his responsibilities, there was a strong expression of a wide range of emotions.

The awakening he caused with his words, I think, was somewhat greater than the awakening in the country caused by the huge number of deaths, and the high growth of Ebola cases since March 2014.

And Ebola, incidentally, is the real reason for this call.

From his State House in capital Freetown, President Koroma, on December 30, called for a seven-day national fasting and prayer, in response to the continuing exponential rise in the number of Ebola victims.

Without mentioning dates, he said that all Sierra Leoneans – Muslims and Christians - should start the New Year by committing the nation in prayers and fasting, so that “we can have the kind of divine direction and grace that is required.”

With 7,800 deaths from Ebola in West African countries - Sierra Leone alone lost 2,582 lives – and with Ebola having affected more than 20,000 people in the world now, the situation is far more serious than the world thinks.

The President’s words, however, angered many people who say he is simply sub-contracting his job to God.

Instead of effectively garnering resources to combat the spread of the deadly pandemic, he is shirking from his responsibility, and is delegating his task to the Power above, is the argument of some.

They say they need a strong and capable leader. Not someone who shies away from the task at his hand, and points us all to heavenly realms -- when the problem is very real, and completely terrestrial.

Celestial or terrestrial, I believe, will be an argument that will never end. But pragmatic effort combined with divine guidance is not really a bad statement of hope from a country whose leadership is struggling to effectively combat - if not to completely cure - the deadly ill.

I am reminded of a biblical story of Prophet Jonah who goes about the Assyrian city of Nineveh preaching to everyone- just as God had commanded him - that God’s wrath is coming on to the city.

After a few days of passionate doomsday preaching, the prophet goes and sits at a vantage point on a hill, watching and waiting for the city to be destroyed.

Interestingly, however, the king and the people respond to Jonah’s words by fasting and praying for several days.

God relents. And the city is saved.

Seeing this, our man Jonah gets upset. He feels that all his work has gone waste.  

But he is immediately reprimanded by God who tells him God can save his people if he chooses.  And that a prophet must just be an obedient messenger.

This old story of Jonah is not an analogy.  It is not meant to show parallels.

It only asks a question.  In facing today’s problems, is it old fashioned, and is it irresponsible, to pray?  

I do not think so.

People and prayer coming together need not be a defeatist act. It could actually be a potent combination.