I remember an interview in a magazine of Sunderlal Bahuguna of the Himalayas. He was asked how he could believe an assurance given by Narasimha Rao who had cheated him in the past after having given yet another assurance. Bahuguna replied: "I work for the people. If politicians are suspicious of everything by nature, I by nature trust everybody and everything. I work with faith. I am God's devotee and hence have nothing like despair." He had been lying down with a fever of 103 degrees and had got up to reply with patience, and went back to bed, writes the correspondent.
This courage, patience and love is not superhuman. If one speaks to our farmers with their traditional wisdom and experience of working on the land, they would speak in a similar fashion. It is a matter of faith that even to this day 70 per cent of our population - mostly people with a rural background - live by such trust and love. It should be the task of our movements to speak to them and avail of their traditional wisdom.
Before dying, Saro-Wiwa's message was, 'I dreamt that I would die with my legs stretched on my own bed'. As long as we too have such dreams, Nigeria's tragedy must appear to be ours too. The bell doesn't toll for somebody else but for us. Each one of us would say 'It tolls for me.' It would then occur to each one of us personally to exclaim, 'It tolls for me alone.'
*The above article has been written by K.V. Subanna and has been translated from Kannada to English by Suchitralata S.
