Without Choice, Freedom is Meaningless

Sometimes, I believe that it is the ability of man to adapt that is the root of all our problems. For, unless you want things to change, they never will. And, unless you dislike the current establishment, at least to the point of resentment, you won’t really want things to change. Not strongly enough for you to do anything about it anyway.

*And the riot be the rhyme of the unheard*

There are food grains rotting in godowns year after year, across the country, while children starve to death slowly, along with the cattle that is too weak to give them any milk to drink or sell to survive. And as they die in homes made of mud and tarpaulin, hundreds of schools and restaurants and cafeterias across cities throw away thousands of tons of food every single day, even while orphanages struggle to find funding for food for all their kids.

The government spends lakhs of rupees on building memorials for the so-called important, and the dead, while the living join those very ranks because they don’t have enough money to survive. Farmer suicides, victims of industrial disasters, survivors of war. Nothing is sacred anymore. Least of all, human life.

The rich feed on the poor, and the corporations of the world move steadfastly on their own path of greed and oppression, often leaving behind a trail of destruction, of both land and water resources, through toxic wastes that slowly seep out and poison the unaware populace day after day.

Where is the justice for the people of Bhopal, betrayed by their own government and State? Where is the justice for the north eastern states, long oppressed by forces of a Nation forcing them to call itself a part of a whole that has never given a fuck about its opinions or welfare, instead subjected to horrors and unjustified violence by the same forces that are supposed to be protecting those very citizens?

There are too many places in this world where it is possible to beat a man to within an inch of his life without ever facing a single consequence. And the voices that speak out are ignored until they get too loud, whereupon they are quickly silenced.

But, someone must testify.

[My own is hoarse. But, I have decided, that if I am going to be consumed by rage, I may as well burn in the name of the graver injustices plaguing our planet. I don’t exactly know where to start, but I suppose reading is always a good idea. The reminiscences of the Cuban Revolutionary War, first.]

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