Tuesday 7 April 2015

Set my vocal chords free

“The pen is mightier than the sword”
Edward. G. Bulwer-Lytton

Right from the beginning of our existence on the earth, our parents have taught us to be honest, peace-loving, social beings.  We grew up thinking, that the world is filled with people who think and act like we were asked to. But as reality syndrome struck us, we realized that what we knew is only partially correct. While there is no dearth of compassion, but a huge part of the society is engulfed by dogmatism and aversion. The realization was hard hitting to the childish hearts. But again we took the shock and the cruel blows of bigotry with hope that this extremism has to end.  Someday, Sometime! But that time never came. The wait never ceased to exist! Yet we maintained composure, afterall violence cannot kill violence, it can only instigate more, making the extremists invincible. They curbed women powers, they curbed general safety and much more, but now they want to curb our basic right, the right to voice our thoughts. Is it acceptable? No!
While in India the recent nullification of Section 66A of the amended Information Technology Act, 2000 was done to prevent the reining of vocal and expressional independence, our neighboring nation has become a threat to the ones with independent thinking. They say the pen is mightier than the sword but in Bangladesh the increasing toll of hacking bloggers and writers to death speaks a different story. The cruel machete slaying the independent thinkers to pieces, takes the whole world by shock. With the recent incidents of religious extremists killing Arijit Roy, an US based writer and blogger and Washiqur Rahman a young Bangladeshi blogger has left the world and especially the world of bloggers in whammy.
We say we are progressive, but where is the progressive thinking? I don’t want to judge the correctness of the religious beliefs that the extremists conceive, actually I don’t care. But how can they snatch the right to speak from the ones who dare to think differently. Each and every human has the right to choose his belief, which comes from his outlook and experience. That can never and ever be enforced. And no one has the right to! A country if deprived of vocal rights, is a dumb country in every respect and growth is never a possibility in such a scenario. As development comes with enlightenment and enlightenment comes with education and with education people tend to become opinionated. Besides a nation like that is like a grenade, with the seething desire to express burning in its core, and when it explodes it reduces everything around to ashes.
So if the extremists and their extreme ways continue, hundreds of Arijits and Washiqurs will rise from the ashes like a phoenix rises from a wreck and then the butchers will not have enough knives to slay heads off.

But we do not want that, we only want peace and tranquility, an atmosphere that inspires a writer to write about beautiful things and not about the wrongs of the society. But if there are wrongs there will be braves to voice them and no strength in the world is invincible enough to stop that upraise.  However this anarchy has to be addressed by the government to establish and enforce law and order. This hooliganism cannot be allowed to curb the liberal thinking of the ones who have the guts to think differently and conviction to be vocal about it.
Aritra Chakrabarty Sengupta

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