Sunday, January 05, 2014
The life of Nelson Mandela demonstrated, as did the life of Mohandas Gandhi illustrate, that a people’s legitimate aspirations cannot be snuffed out but will triumph in the end. A people’s spirit that finds incarnation in a determined soul to give it life, flesh and blood cannot be extinguished. It cannot be incarcerated. It cannot be stifled or stilled. It cannot be killed.
Building up a working relationship: Rajapaksa and C.V. Wigneswaran exchanging views soon after the latter took oaths as the Chief Minister of the Northern Province.
The use of raw force can overpower it. Military might can flay it. The entire state apparatus of a despotic government can bulldoze it and raze it to the ground. But in its ashes the embers will still burn, glowing brightest when the night is at its darkest to spurt forth anew a raging inferno beyond control.
Mandela was jailed for more than 27 years. His voice silenced behind prison walls. His soul barred from the light of life beyond his celibate cell, denied intercourse with the outside world. But his spirit, which no moat or fort could bar, moved a nation to breakdown the tyranny of apartheid. Gandhi was imprisoned many a time; his Buddhist doctrine of ahimsa, nonviolence, even when met with violence, tested many a time and oft tinged with despair, doubts and defeats, succeeded at the end in the overthrow of the colonial yoke, leading to the dismantling of an empire the world had never seen before. What Hitler attempted to do with violence and disastrously failed, one man, in a loin cloth and a spinning wheel, a one-time Inner Temple Barrister ridiculed as a half-naked fakir, triumphed with his home spun doctrine of nonviolence.