Redefining Freedom

If you happen to google freedom you would come across two strikingly different definitions. While “freedom” is defined as the “power” or “right” to act, speak or think as one wants, the other says it’s the state of not being imprisoned. How strikingly bizarre & antonymist!! Isn’t it?

Upon analysing, I find even power (which is granted) different from the right (which is inherited). Power is about capabilities which you acquire over period of time. Right is something which you have earned by birth or by nature of the state of being. Treating power as right may trade on the path to justify an abuse. Abuse and freedom can’t be breathed in through the same nostrils.

The second definition says it’s the state of not being imprisoned. Or if I may say that being free is to feel happy about the fact that you aren’t imprisoned as yet. This doesn’t fall in democratic prevue.

So, what exactly is freedom? How exactly would you define and draw a “state of being free”!!

Rabindranath Tagore talks about freedom that “Emancipation from the bondage of the soil is no freedom for the tree”. To set something free is not liberation, rather it is sui juris to imagine the same.

If you go back by a few years, dinner table discussions were on sports, relatives, titbits, children and office conundrum. Seldom would you have found your near ones being engrossed into winged politics. Off late the atmosphere is politically charged and not being able to stand a contrasting opinion is imprisonment. Being un-opinionated out of fear isn’t freedom at all!!

Being opinionated as a distinct sect shoots you in a zone of being a revolutionary or an idiot hood. There is an attempt to colour the uncoloured, an attempt to opinionate the deadlock and stalemates which is con to freedom. The greasy spooners aren’t on easy streets anymore.

We try to find a meaning in khadi, a meaning in being liberal and a meaning in being tolerant. Colours have become sect friendly; flowers aren’t irreverent anymore. Beards make a predictive statement, architecture isn’t only histo-architectural anymore and being judgmental is a statement. Off late there is a lot of hue and cry over languages. The naysayers are ranking languages de rigueur. Food is voguish and isn’t about preference anymore. Cherishing and nurturing diversity is offering freedom.

Lord Ram who lead his life as a precedent of supreme modesty, Gandhi who fought for the very freedom we put up in airs so often, are the best examples of being tolerant, liberal, non-judgemental and being able to “let go”. Spiritual tangent is freedom. Being tolerant is offering freedom.

Being able to talk politics and not being labelled is freedom. Being able to serve unfiltered emotions and thoughts to society is freedom. Being able to have a mind of your own and be respectful to all minds is freedom. Having an unbiased humanitarian understanding to existence is freedom. To be able to hear irreconcilable and antithetical incompatible views is offering freedom.

Covid has redefined our behaviour and boundaries, fears and limitations. We lived in seclusion, incarceration, offered solitary confinement and were witness to migration, hunger, and deaths. These emotions took us back to the pre-freedom era so much so that we solicit the vaccine as a flag for Quit India Corona movement.

Mask is the new khadi; vaccine is the new tool!!

As Gandhiji proclaimed, “The true measure of any society can be found in how it treats its most vulnerable members”. Let’s take a moment to re-define vulnerability. The ones who live on edge of being exposed to being harmed physically and emotionally are called vulnerable as per the dictionary. Here I am not talking about the creed gangs on mean streets but rather what I mean by vulnerability is refutation. The children of lesser God are open to refutation, the destitute, the despondent, the wretched, the blighted and the introverts. Introvertism is vulnerability which in extremist overtones finds itself in seclusion, in nepotistic aura and hangs off the ceiling.

I ask myself, “Aren’t you already feeling like a freedom fighter?”

 Let’s give ourselves this certificate of being a freedom fighter. Let’s fight to gain freedom from the deadly virus which has sworn to get across the nostrils. Let’s fight for the right to “being masked”, the right to ask for a step back and right to “live and let live”. And also pledge to listen, hear, and be there.

“Offering than desiring” is redefining freedom!!