"Liberté" - the last word uttered by the 'Spy Princess' Noor Inayat Khan before she was killed in enemy camps. A word so fascinating that people give up their lives in glorious imaginations of such a reality. An ideology powerful enough to start revolutions, to change history.
What is it that drives people to give up their lives, just with imaginations of their efforts reaping benefits towards this cause, in the process essentially giving up all hopes of their own realisation of this ideology?
We imagine ourselves to be absolutely free - free to do as our heart and instincts bids us. We move on a glorious super-reality, imagining ourselves roaming in the absolute. We crave it, we imagine it, we idealise it, yet, ironically, never reaching that state - always missing it.
What exactly do we miss? What exactly is this state of liberty that we all aspire for? Sitting in my comfortable couch in my drawing room in this supposedly 'free' state, I idealise and glorify liberty probably in much the same way our freedom fighters in our pre-independence era seems to have done - a way which probably only someone missing something can do. But weren't the freedom fighters supposed to have taken us a step forward towards this glorious state? So, by such standards, I should be dwelling in a state much nearer to what they had aspired for - meaning I should not miss this as much. But I do.
And if the society is anything to go by, I'm not alone. What is the image that seduces us? The image of a carefree young wild innocent life - someone who knows only to follow pure instincts, unadulterated by norms of social living - in this sense absolutely pure and innocent - in whom the child still reigns supreme - whom experience and knowledge have not subdued. This image, in its various forms, is dished out to us everyday in advertisements, films, stories, etc., and we tend to eat this image like famined animals.
But haven'’t we knowingly and consciously sacrificed that freedom? Where there is a state, there can be no freedom. A very just and true saying. The liberty we imagine means only to go back to purest (or the most impure?!) form of living - like the wild animals. A way of life which is both hailed in some ways and looked at with extreme disdain in other ways. A state men surely have tasted once - thousands of years ago - and which we have forsaken for the civilised life. The irony here, it seems, is that we leave a state by our own choice, but then start to fight for it!
Why this conflict? I don't know. But one (probably oversimplified) way of looking at it would be that most people do not really get to 'choose' this state. It seems, only a smaller number of people actually get chances to experience the pros and cons of both these states (or rather, something nearer to these states) - of total freedom and lawlessness, and of an organised structure, and something have made them choose the later. What is this 'something' is the natural question which follows. Security is the most likely answer. Of course, there are also many other factors like collective mentality, etc. which comes into play. I'll not dwell on that any more now.
Now, what would you choose, given a chance? The security and the guarantee of the minimum throughout the life, or the liberty to taste the absolute, even it would be for just a while? Don'’t bother - it'’s a redundant question.
What is it that drives people to give up their lives, just with imaginations of their efforts reaping benefits towards this cause, in the process essentially giving up all hopes of their own realisation of this ideology?
We imagine ourselves to be absolutely free - free to do as our heart and instincts bids us. We move on a glorious super-reality, imagining ourselves roaming in the absolute. We crave it, we imagine it, we idealise it, yet, ironically, never reaching that state - always missing it.
What exactly do we miss? What exactly is this state of liberty that we all aspire for? Sitting in my comfortable couch in my drawing room in this supposedly 'free' state, I idealise and glorify liberty probably in much the same way our freedom fighters in our pre-independence era seems to have done - a way which probably only someone missing something can do. But weren't the freedom fighters supposed to have taken us a step forward towards this glorious state? So, by such standards, I should be dwelling in a state much nearer to what they had aspired for - meaning I should not miss this as much. But I do.
And if the society is anything to go by, I'm not alone. What is the image that seduces us? The image of a carefree young wild innocent life - someone who knows only to follow pure instincts, unadulterated by norms of social living - in this sense absolutely pure and innocent - in whom the child still reigns supreme - whom experience and knowledge have not subdued. This image, in its various forms, is dished out to us everyday in advertisements, films, stories, etc., and we tend to eat this image like famined animals.
But haven'’t we knowingly and consciously sacrificed that freedom? Where there is a state, there can be no freedom. A very just and true saying. The liberty we imagine means only to go back to purest (or the most impure?!) form of living - like the wild animals. A way of life which is both hailed in some ways and looked at with extreme disdain in other ways. A state men surely have tasted once - thousands of years ago - and which we have forsaken for the civilised life. The irony here, it seems, is that we leave a state by our own choice, but then start to fight for it!
Why this conflict? I don't know. But one (probably oversimplified) way of looking at it would be that most people do not really get to 'choose' this state. It seems, only a smaller number of people actually get chances to experience the pros and cons of both these states (or rather, something nearer to these states) - of total freedom and lawlessness, and of an organised structure, and something have made them choose the later. What is this 'something' is the natural question which follows. Security is the most likely answer. Of course, there are also many other factors like collective mentality, etc. which comes into play. I'll not dwell on that any more now.
Now, what would you choose, given a chance? The security and the guarantee of the minimum throughout the life, or the liberty to taste the absolute, even it would be for just a while? Don'’t bother - it'’s a redundant question.
