Vi Veri Veniversum Vivus Vici (By the power of Truth, I, while living , have conquered the Universe)
While those that know me would concur, I am not a person moved easily. Distracted yes, but not moved. But the other day something stirred deep within me whilst watching a movie, something that prompted me to put fingers to keyboard on this page yet again after a self-imposed hiatus. After all cinema is the rooted in art and art is only most inspiring when it mirrors reality.
" ...Beneath this mask there is more than flesh. Beneath this mask there is an idea, Mr. Creedy, and ideas are bulletproof. "
These words, albeit more verbose than succinct, struck a chord somewhere. Punching furiously on the keyboard at work made me forget that words are all we have to identify ourselves with. They are reflections of our cognizance, mirrors of our minds, forms and functions of our feelings. Words are words that give meaning to meaning. To leap out of a page and confront the reader - to convey, confuse, complement, commiserate or corrupt. Words give you the power to communicate, a power that is almost always short sold in the age of information overload.
Freedom, fairness, justice and faith are more than mere words - they are perspectives. They let you sit on both sides of the fence, sometimes even on it - but force you to see and acknowledge that there is a fence. Such is its beauty . Words are but mere symbols garbing the notion hidden behind. Perhaps, the greatest power of words stems from their being vehicles to ideas, imagination and intuition. And ideas are all that we can call truly our own. Ideas do not budge. They are not frightened, people are. Ideas are not corrupted, the society is. Ideas do not discriminate, individuals do. Ideas do not stop or tire, laugh or cry. They can not be touched by hand nor felt on your skin. They do not fear and do not warrant fear. They do not feel love or hate. They do not heal nor do they bleed. Ideas are ideas - a timeless, limitless epitome of liberation and the liberated. Ideas are bulletproof.
Capable of spawning genesis and apocalypse in equal measure, ideas are fundamentally the legacy of humanity. And the ability to learn, inspire and build upon these ideas is what makes us truly human, or so I was raised to believe.
A society bereft of ideas to stimulate its own evolution is a society best left bereft. And ours is inching towards one that threatens to stagnate- rot in its own bile of prejudice and preconceptions. Freedom of speech and expression is rationed to you at the cost of being constantly monitored. For fear that the world will accept truth at its face value. So when a google search on Tianamen square throws up nothing within China or when a whistle-blower is shot in eastern Uttar Pradesh - it is an assault not on democracy but on human ingenuity itself. When every new idea is assumed guilty until proven innocent - fear manifests itself and manifolds; colouring ideas and words with its own hues of right and wrong.
Which brings me back to words and the ideas they represent. While you may feel that I might have used too much of the former and have no clue of the latter, I am only trying to reason why our ideas and words must be guided by perspective and not by perception. And with enough time, the rights and wrongs, like stock markets, tend to sort themselves out.
History reminds humanity that it must act on ideas and not impulses. That said I'd like to leave you with this thought ...
"We're oft to blame, and this is too much proved, that with devotion's visage and pious action we do sugar on the devil himself. "
