Should you proffer your worldview, know that you risk being sidelined, even humiliated. In the den kept in order by stone-written principles, you become an aberration, a tragic spectacle. You are laughed at, smiled at, and shrieked at.
Your formulations become a crime, to be eradicated, and you – put in the dungeon. Under the pretext of keeping everything in rhythm and in order, you are shown a clenched fist. You dry your throat screaming that you are innocent – that what you meant is not to be construed as something detrimental but as something worth pondering.
You sweat, and you smile at each brickbat thrown at you. Your conscience speaks a thousand voices cursing this universe once and for all. You wonder if there exists anyone with any sense to sift your hullabaloo and anguished visage through the sieve and extract the beauty that underlies them: desperation for an improved system.
You speak once, and you speak again – even louder – provided you are not listened to. That’s your sin. Your blunder when you act based on your instincts, not logic nor reasoning nor suitability.
You carry a shadow that looms large, and it induces fear in you. And even then if you refuse to cringe, they launch a final offensive against you – something you are unable to confront. There your worldview ends.
Even if we agreed for a second that you posed a threat to the society, did it not urge us to put on a thinking cap and contemplate why the threat existed to begin with? What deep-seated grudges mutated into something infirmly concrete? Even in politics, the opposition doesn’t always rant and rail against everything without value; there is some truth and utility to what they protest.
As someone rightly says, ‘in anything seemingly ugly, there is beauty: deep within – not palpable.’ That we fail to dig down (and don’t scour for the diamond) doesn’t mean it doesn’t exist. It’s very much there – playing hide-and-seek. Puzzle, right?
That’s how the system should work. Not deducing value from the surface. But from the deep recesses, stretches, the unknown. There lies the answer to everything confusing and frustrating us.
That’s what the essence of democracy encompasses also: comparing two conflicting ideas and arriving at conclusion which is inclusive, loving, and definitely not excluding. Filtering wheat from the chaff is must – the same way something criminal has to be dispensed with. A tad loud dissent doesn’t qualify for a crime!
But before we find the chaff, the wheat must not emit stench. Wheat must not hoodwink us into believing that it’s edible when it is hollow inside with impurities eating away at it.
Human madness has limits!