WHEN LIFE STOOD STILL

PROF. WILLIAM E. HOOKENS

Principal, Government College, Mandla

We are told in the Christian Scriptures that once a Great Battle was to be fought and decided on, and a good man prayed that the sun should stand still. And, believe it or not, it stood still! The Great Battle was fought to the finish, showing the unruly wicked party that nothing could be gained by the show of evil. Good triumphs always in the end, though it does not seem to be so in the beginning. We have the great story or Leo Tolstoi. A good man came to harm and was even imprisoned for a long time. One day the culprit was also in the same prison (and he came to it very much later than he should have done) and asked forgiveness of the good man. The story is God sees the Truth, but waits to Tell.

Life today seems different, so different that we seem strangers on this planet. The immovability of life, the constancy that was ours, is gone never more to return. We see but do not understand and we wonder what life is all about. Where are the people, places and things we saw and knew and understood? Where are all the old memorable things, including monuments and huge buildings and forts? Where are the untilled lands that spread for miles, and the places where we laughed and romped about and went on horse or donkey rides? Where are the smiling faces that made life a thing of wonder and meaning? Where are the talkers who talked on till late in the night and whose talks were a pleasure to hear? Where are the big matronly women who would come at any emergency and squash all troubles? Those were the days when men, even big-made men with power and influence, quailed before one or more of these matronly-looking women who were indeed ladies to their finger tips. They understood much, though they said little. They looked harsh, even fierce, but they were the last word for softness, sympathy. There was nothing they’d not do, from coming to soothen a bereaved family in the middle of the night, to looking after children that were not theirs but who were in their keeping for one reason or another.

Today all’s so changed that I cannot believe it is true. How can my country and people change so much overnight? I ask myself to find that I am the only one to ask this question, as though it were a played-out question like the one literary students asked a decade or so ago as to whether Pope was a poet? Today we accept him as such, seeing that poets and poetry have changed so much that there is no knowing who is a poet and what poetry is. But then it is the price we pay for the change we want or wish for, almost as if we were like the child in R. L. Stevenson’s short-story who wanted to go where the cars came from and was tired of being too long in the country he was. The gypsy has taken possession or us and we are restless, after one thing or another. The intellectuals call it a quest and the mediocres, travel. That this travel is neither education nor experience, as old Bacon would call it, makes travel a disturbing influence. We see this in the lives of those who have travelled, expecting from travel the best that’s to be seen, heard and felt. Human that we are, we cannot help being restless.

Why is this so? we ask, and the reason is that travel out our environment into another makes us change. We begin to dress and feel and behave as the natives of the country we are in do. Yet, with all our imitativeness, we are different from them and we feel it as much as they do. A day comes when, with all our adjustment to the people and the country, we feel we are not being accepted and are even discriminated against. We say: “Hell with the place and the people! If this is civilisation, let’s have nothing to do with it!” We go back to our country to find it not the same as we left it, and we are mad with our people and ourselves. Why need our country have changed? We wish we had not left it and yet we feel we are not poor for all our travel. We have seen people and places and things. They are different from ours, so what? We now see that there’s reason for their difference, much as we love that country, we wish we had not been born there, feeling as we do the simplicity and primitivity of our country and people. For despite all the show of our people in progress or advance, they have not changed. And you wish they had really changed rather than make a show of it. You feel mad about this unchangeables and associate it with rank stupidity and this is certainly not tradition as you think and feel it should be. Why are the people such humbugs? You ask yourself. The answer is that they are first bluffing themselves and all others afterwards. They cannot help it. It is because they do not know where they are and how they stand in the context of life. And with a view to showing others that they are progressive they change, clothes-wise and even in speech. But beneath there is the old that is rigidly the same and wants no change and the change they make is in such directions as would have been better without any change.

The rich fields, the many happy villages and the love for flowers and greenery seemed to have gone out of life and in their place are to be found factories and small industrial plants and pseudo villages where the joy of the people is changed to sorrow. Instead of the farmer growing rich crops and feeling himself self-sufficient, he is being enticed into the city so that his land may be taken away from him. The farmer no longer feels happy as a villager and the old trades are no longer there to occupy himself and others with. He leaves for the city. He will get all his pleasures and comforts from the cities and thither he will always travel. He sells his bullock-cart and the bulls and even the hutment that was his from olden times. He goes out in hopes of a new life and there is his wife who wants a change from the one she knows, in keeping with the change in the city-born folk, and the man also wants a change and before long, there are the children who are now roaming the streets and learn the ill-manners of the city-born children. It is needless to continue this sad story of the villager in detail, except to state the outline. One day he finds himself in the lock-up for dealing with illicit liquor. His wife who was as loyal as loyal could be, sees in her new paramour the sign of a new life and, before the children turn up home, the couple have eloped to Bombay. The children look after themselves as best as they can and grow up before their time. They have no mother or father to look to. They soon learn the ways of life and either join a gang of thieves or do work for a pittance. Love and the sense of belonging have left them. They feel themselves orphans and they have none to turn to because all are so busy, looking after themselves. One can live or die, depending on what one wants to do. There is none to go out of his way to advise or help. Why should anyone go out of his way when life’s hard and things have changed? It’s time one changed or quit.

Schools, colleges, universities and hospitals have increased but what a sorry change in them all! There are more teachers and doctors and nurses but something has gone out of them all. They have lost the spirit of their vocation. They are changed men and women and are all for changing all who come into their contact, in keeping with the change that is apparent in all walks of life. Those teachers who are for the old-gold ways of living are either in the minority or silenced by those who matter and who are all for the change that they feel is better for life. Those doctors and nurses who see in their vocation a thing of dedication continue to fight against terrible odds who are for making this dedication a mockery. When schools, colleges, universities and hospitals have ceased to fulfil their noble functions and are now being overrun by mediocres who have been failures in life, what is to be done but to pray that light may dawn on people who matter. May they see the idiocy, almost suicidal way of life as it is! What is wrong today is that we have put first things last and want life to function?

Putting the cart before the horse is a good trick or experiment now and again, as part of child-play, but serious people do not do it as a matter of course when they want the cart to be on the move. Experiments are good but not experiments for their own sakes. Experiments with a view to bettering the life of the people are worth their weight in gold but then who cares for people in the mass? People are nothing more than abstractions, and my comfort, my betterment in something concrete, something I can work for. Society, around which individuals took their being and saw their meaning in life, has become nothing more than a conglomeration of individuals of varied castes and creeds and classes who are brought together in a disjointed manner. What is worse, the state has grown so powerful that societies do not count and those representatives who are for kow-towing to the state are forced on societies and the good and beautiful things that societies bred in individuals are no longer operating, their place being taken by wily politicians who are for ruining man as man and harnessing him to the juggernaut of politics.

Where one’s religion, colour or class is not accepted where can there be a meeting-ground of man as man? Democracy, all said and done, is the getting together of people of varied thoughts and feelings and convictions on a common platform for the common good. All cannot be equal, but all can strive for equality by the only road, namely merit. Where the mind is recognised as a Gold-Mine and where it is made to develop to its maximum by education and the opening of such places where the great minds can meet to solve the problems of life. But where all are made to feel equal when they are not so and are thrust into posts of responsibility on grounds of nepotism nothing good can come to the people or country. There win always be seething discontent among the people. None likes to take orders from someone who knows nothing of his job or the art of dealing with people as people. Where force is made to cement people together there is bound to be conflagration at every step. Nothing can be forced down people’s throats, and any form of pressure is anathema to the progress or contentment of the people.

Life has to change or it is not life. But in wanting to change life, one need not denude life of its lifeness. It is an very well changing the water with which the baby has been washed in a tub, but in throwing the dirty water one need not throw the tub or the baby away. There are certain things to be adhered to, and it behoves us to pay attention to the things that matter and have mattered all these centuries. We cannot be like Ring Canute, wanting the waters of the sea to obey us. We have to accept Divinity or a Great power, howsoever much it irks our egos. There is something greater and mightier than us and whether we know it or not, we are witnessing miracles every moment of our lives. The birth of a child is as much a miracle as adult living in a world of extreme complexities. And it would therefore be futile, in the name of progress or even civilisation, to throw away the good and holy and beautiful things of life on grounds of change.

Our prisons and asylums are fun of young men and women, even grown-ups who are finding the change in day-to-day life too much for their sensitivity. Our jobs are taking huge tolls of our life and instead of our jobs being a means to sound living, they have become the end of life itself. What a great number suffer from ulcers and are worried to death because the naturalness of life and living is gone. In their place artificiality and formality are gaining ground. What a number of marriages are wrecked every few months in this country and in the world because the sanctity of marriage is not adhered to. Where marriage has become a synonym for licence in loose living, there can be nothing good for indiviauls, societies and the states to show. What a number of teachers, doctors, nurses, scientists and technicians see in life a bleak affair. Their life-time work and experience being ridiculed at every turn and mediocres are taking their coveted place. Where innocence is taken for stupidity and the facts of life are thrust before the impressionable young, when Fairies and Angels are looked down as products of a primitive mind, when myth and symbolism have lost their significance and folklore is thrown into the dust, life and living become as artificial as hot-house plants. Life, wheresoever we are, cannot be secure, stable unless we have roots in the past. Unless there are present the basic things of life–a sense of values, the sanctity of the individual as individual and his right to live in conformity with his conscience and the tradition of the country he is in. All other things are mere tinkling cymbals.

The Taj Mahal is not only a great relic of the past but it is something in which not only the foreign tourist can take a delight by studying its history, but also the people of the country. It is no use calling it an Indian product when it is Muslim, and the Muslim, all said and done, is a human being by his right and is in no way inferior to any other. Nor is a Hindu nor a Negro nor a Harijan. All are God’s people and should be treated as such. The Jews today are not considered the enemy of Christians but as friends. They are as human as Christians and Christians, for that matter, are not that good or holy. They crucify Christ every moment of their living moments because they mock at Him, spit on Him, put a crown of thorns on His head, see Him bleed. And Christian Europe is not that Christian or would we see constantly cold wars in the offing? The East is not that wonderful although it has within its archives the secrets of life. East or West, North or South, we are a poor people who are becoming poorer because we are fighting against the Laws of Life, our God and Maker and make ourselves gods on earth, paving the way for Babylon.

I would look forward to a people and country where the primitive qualities of love are deepened rather than eradicated. And it is this which all religions try to promote–this sense of love for one’s fellow-beings. But what do we do but try to suffocate, choke in fact this love as though it were a useless plant, to be nipped in the bud or killed in the soil? Are we not ashamed of ourselves for allowing other primitive instincts to come to the fore, namely anger, revenge, jealousy, murder? Or would the death of Gandhi, Kennedy and King come about so untimely? Why was it that we are against the good gardener who wants to make of life a rich garden? Why do we lock out men and women from their own homes where the best reside, including love, religion, sanctity, children? Why do we cast people out of their homes into the streets and make them come home more dead than pleased? Why do we take away the women from their homes and plant them elsewhere? Why do people in charge of such changes not see that in constant transfers of good people from place to place they lose their stability, and find themselves among strangers? And tradition is another name for stability. Why is the Government in Ceylon, Africa, Britain and elsewhere constantly uprooting people who have made themselves secure? The UNESCO and the WHO are for bringing all people together in amity and health, and why then this constant interference with people of other nationalities? Art, music and religion are for harmonising people and their differences and it’s a crime against God and Man to sow discord in life.

Britain is a beautiful country, made all the more beautiful to me because of her great men and women who have been literary and influentially so all these centuries. And to see the Lakeland District or Stratford-on-Avon is almost like making a literary pilgrimage to the greats who have made themselves universally so. Britain has conquered India both by arms and love and the enduring testimony to the British is their love for the Good, the True and the Beautiful as exemplified in their literature and the good and great men and women who were here. But need this love suddenly contract the selfishness?...India is my country but I feel a stranger in it because I am not a party to the evils that are becoming current. There is much that I would like to see changed in India, including narrow parochialism and the freedom that has caused India’s image to be tarnished abroad. It is not enough making India a country for foreign tourists. It should be made beautifully clean and livable for the people of the country. Classism should go and with it status-symbols. All must be made to feel the dignity of work. When all put their shoulders to the wheel the car or cart that has got stuck in the mud, can get on the road and move. There is no man so low as a lazy person or so evil as a conceited rat. Love, humility, understanding and sympathy are expected of an old country that has spiritual traditions all through the ages. Hospitality, for which the East is noted for, should not be made to disappear. Ghee has vanished out of the country, as good men and have and so has gold. But all these good things can come back only if we want them, not for ourselves alone, but for all our people and others living here. America is a rich country and it can be very much richer if it goes the way of the early Settlers who wanted America to be the El Dorado of the world and the refuge of all who suffer or are pained. Russia can do much to tide over Chinese invasion if only Russia sees in God the Maker of Heaven and Earth and grants individual the freedom to live. Or what are men but chattels if they are not free? China, all said and done, is an Eastern country, with Eastern traditions of love and plenty and the world looks to the East for Peace not Yellow Fever. Wherever we live we want life and its comforts, the finer things of life. Above all we want human beings who are like God, for they alone give meaning to life and tradition, and make it continuous, undying, like literature, art and religion.

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