‘A brook for a brook,and a sunset for a sunset.’
Can you compensate for something you can’t measure? Can you hear the void screams of silenced voices? Because mostly, it’s the deafening silence that pierces the most. In the prolonged legal battle of NBA, the Movement to save Narmada, the Supreme Court ordered compensation to the displaced indigenous tribe by providing ‘land for land’. To which the petitioner, representing the displaced replied “we aren’t just losing land, but a habitus. Then how can ‘a land for a land’ do justice? Can you compensate for a- running brook for a running brook, and a sunset for a sunset.”
Let's take a pause and unpack some very familiar yet unfamiliar ideas. There's a certain romanticism in the abstract nature of ideas of love, justice, passion, which render these words as ‘empty-containers’. They can mean anything you want them to mean. Then what’s the point of laboring intellectually to give them a form? Answer- To provide them with certain normativity and integrity, so that it can sustain the erosion of callous use and meaninglessness. Language rescues us from the void of meaninglessness.
Justice means to restore harmony. Harmony, in its most intuitive sense, draws us to the idea of balance and equilibrium. Equilibrium, in turn, has to do with equivalence. Now primitively, equivalence could be created only with reciprocity, like “An eye for an eye”. Sooner or later, people realised it’ll turn the whole world blind. Oops, can’t continue on this dead end road. Nor is there any going back. Fortunately, another road appeared from the thicket- ‘compensation’. With compensation, came the extremely functional system of convertibility, equivalence and exchange. Hence, Justice took a sigh of relief. But it wasn’t for long, that Justice realised it’s buying into its own hubris. The edifice of the modern justice system is grounded on its ability to provide forms of measure and equivalence. But is it really possible to measure everything?
How do you compensate for a lost sunset, or a lost way of living? Move your gaze across the spectrum of time, and you’ll hear similar stories emanating from all corners of the world. While Samurai’s ways of living were lost in Japan to the trampede of USA’s’ capitalism, the Bhudhhist ways of Tibet got encroached by China’s militarism. By this time,the aborigines of Australia had long perished at the hands of imperialism. What survived the march of modernity, if not a disoriented and disharmonized residue of the human race. In such context, reading Chief Seattle's words, they lodge in the corner of one’s mind a realisation that henceforth will keep gnawing in the deepest part of your heart. When the natives in the Americas were demanded to sell their land to Washington, Chief Seattle replied “How can you buy or sell the sky, the warmth of the land? That idea is strange to us.... every shining needle, every sandy shore, every mist in the dark is holy in the memory and experience of my people.The sap which courses through the trees carries the memory of the red man…. So when the great chief Washington sends word that he wishes to buy our land he asks much of us… the destiny is mysterious to us.. the God who brought you to this land and for some special purpose gave you dominion over this land and red man…. when the buffalo are all slaughtered, the wild horses are tamed,
the secret corners of the forest heavy with the scent of many men,
and the view of ripe hills blotted by talking wires.
Where is the thicket? Gone.
Where is the eagle? Gone.
The end of living and the beginning of survival.”
Organic harmony died a slow painful death. People perished, societies perished, and along with them perished the possibility of imagining an alternative way of living. We created a clone world. And together we now suffer it’s cruelty of inhuman isolation. Isolation from nature, from fellow people, from the self. These stories of lost societies, resounding the desperate attempts of peace loving people, aren’t just the voices of the ghosts of the past. These are, but the alarms of the frantically lost and starved children from the future. Only, if we can still hear them in the midst of this clatter, only if we can wake up before they go silent.