Some victories are indeed defeats!

SOME VICTORIES ARE INDEED DEFEATS!​

Emperor Ashoka renounced the world and started his spiritual journey after he won the great war of Kalinga. Sometimes victory is the greatest defeat. We have faced such situations many times in our lives. We argue with our kith and kin and try to establish our supremacy. We may win the argument, simply because the others may give up or shut up getting tired or the argument may be put to an end by a third party out of disgust! But after that, we never feel comfortable. Every word that we uttered and heard in return keeps reverberating in our ears. We keep reliving the whole episode again and again. Then we realize that we could have avoided saying so many things and we realize how in the quest of winning the argument, we have hurt the other party by saying unreasonable things. Or the vice versa where we are hurt by the other party who went berserk in using vocabulary and winning over us! That’s when we feel that the victory of that word game is indeed a defeat for the winner.

The victory that the Sri Lankan Government is claiming is one such victory. When seventy to eighty thousand people have been mercilessly butchered by the LTTE as well as the Sri Lankan army and police over the last 25-30 years and lakhs of people have been displaced from their own motherland with deep scars of violence and hatred, what has the Sri Lankan Government won? This is the land to which Emperor Ashoka had sent his children to spread the peaceful religion of Buddhism! The word ‘peace’ had lost its meaning there. The dreadful stories of torture and violence that innocent people suffered because of a political pride will send chills down the spine of any person. Such stories are the results in any war. Thousands of innocent women are heartlessly raped and butchered, thousands of innocent children are killed, maimed and orphaned. How are these people concerned with some issues that are bothering a nation?

It is a shame that people living in the peaceful nations enjoy all the comforts and just read the news of such wars fought in the other parts of the world for various reasons like ethnicity, religion, caste, political borders, oil, rights, etc., over a cup of coffee. Of course no outside nation should be interfering in the internal affairs of another nation. But there is a limit up to which you can tolerate injustice and violence in your neighbour’s house! Don’t you run to your neighbour’s house when the internal fights reach ugly and indecent limits and try to drive sense into the people saying, ‘look, this is a locality where decent people reside! Behave yourselves and settle issues by talking peacefully’.

Time and again it has been proved that violence only begets violence. Hatred nurtures more hatred. Maybe the LTTE should have sought the help of some mature outside nations to sort out their issues with the Sri Lankan Government, before taking up armed struggle. What is the use of this long-drawn war which was an eternal thorn in the lives of both the Tamils and the peace-loving Sinhalese? When things went so sour, all the other nations remained either mute spectators or just made cosmetic requests to stop the violence, which had no effect on either the LTTE or the Sri Lankan Government. Just like the Kalinga War, the scenes of victory only bring tears in our eyes and ache in our hearts. The dead are fortunate because the condition of the survivors has become tougher now. Thousands of them are living dirty lives of refugees having lost most of their kith and kin and thousands of them will be at the mercy of the victorious Sri Lankan Government. Most of these innocent people may not even know exactly what led to such a bloody war which led them spending almost their entire prime life in fear, poverty, pain, emotional break-down and uncertainty. They may not even understand what ‘peace’ means.

This war should be a gory reminder to all those who are indulging in meaningless violence for some reasons which the general public cannot even understand, all over the world. The ultimate aim of any human being is just to lead a peaceful life, where all his basic needs of food, shelter and clothing are taken care of.

Let each of us now pledge to establish peace on this planet. After all each of us has just about sixty fruitful years to live. Let us make this world a better place in our lifetime, instead of leaving our gory footprints of violence here.

Sudha Narasimhachar