• Valson Thampu

It was not long ago that Vayalar, the lyricist par excellence of Malayalis, sang: ‘Give me once again the boon I pray // To be born on this, the blessed shore of beauty.’ I am glad he is not in our midst. Else, he would have, I fear, withdrawn this immortal lyric from circulation. Today a grim realization is spreading that the social and ethical pathology of our society is spinning out of control. Senseless, violence is excoriating Kerala with incremental intensity, of which the infamous Venjaranmood tragedy is the latest and the most horrendous.

It is not merely the scale of the violence perpetrated that should shock us in this case. A young lad of twenty-three bludgeoning to death five of his dear ones is irrational beyond imagination. In the media discussions that ensued this horror or horrors, the focus was on itemizing the causes of our social ill-health. A deafening silence prevails as regards the more basic question: Why are we failing to live sensibly, normally, and purposefully at the present time?

To me, the fundamental issue is not that violence is metastasizing all through Kerala. The primary issue is that we are losing the capacity to live with meaning, dignity and earnestness of purpose. The essence of violence is energy. Energy per se is neither good nor bad. It becomes either, depending on what for it is employed. A surgeon too uses energy, even aggressive force in the case of limb amputations. We are not alarmed by it. We feel differently, when a thug chops off someone’s limb in a fit of anger. Violence is energy deployed against life. It is how the capacity to act expresses itself when the agent of action knows no better use for it.

In the Venjaranmood case, the family of the murder-accused accumulated debts, reportedly to the tune of Rs. 15 lakhs. He felt the need to act in that context. What did he do? Killing five or six of his family members is not the remedy for the malady. That seemed the only remedy, because he had become self-enclosed and unsustainably wasteful in his lifestyle. A young man, in whom the capacity to act rationally is developed even embryonically, will not take to the path that Affan did. This is the core issue. We refuse to face this reality, I surmise, because we don’t have it in us to re-orient ourselves from the path we have chosen for ourselves. This, then, is the fundamental need. A society needs to be oriented, or re-oriented, as the case may be, from death to life. It is the ageless prayer: mrtyorma amrtam gamaya. It is this capacity for life that we are losing. Pathological violence is its wakeup call.

That brings us to the irony of the social reality we are facing today. Crime seems to many to be the only way available to them to act significantly. Generally speaking, those who want to live normally and meaningfully feel disempowered in Kerala. Mostly, only those who act crudely and cruelly experience a sense of personal effectiveness. Others live, secretly nursing a sense of victimhood.

Affan’s father left Kerala to earn a livelihood. He could feed his family, given what the state has become, only by abandoning it to the wolves. The choice is stark: stomach or heart. To whosoever there is an escape route from Kerala, the stomach is triumphing over the heart. And that is the abyss.

Violence -especially senseless violence- symptomizes the decay of a society. Ask yourself, dear reader, which aspect of life in Kerala is in good health: schools, colleges, parties, police, cities, roads, churches …. Ever since I relocated myself to Kerala in 2016, I have not had a single experience with private service providers in which I did not end up cheated. Dishonesty is becoming the grammar of our shared life. The concept of neighbourhood is all but evaporated. Equally, a feeling is gaining ground that life is cheap and it is naïve to be noble and principled. What, do you think, is the cultural profile of Kerala? How many of us have any worthwhile intellectual interests? How many are able, or willing, to discuss issues having regard for truth and justice? Often I whisper to myself the words of St Paul: ‘Set your minds on things high’.

The words of Jesus have acquired now a special resonance for me: ‘Your faith has made you whole’. Now I understand the scope of ‘faith’ differently. A practical function of faith is to liberate us from the oppressive confinement in the given. How is a person to maintain his faith in life, if he regards only what prevails around him. What Affan lacked -thanks to liquor, drugs and a murderous lifestyle- is the courage to look beyond the present. As the Psalmist says, ‘Weeping may endure through the night, but joy comes in the morning’! True; but how is one do so in the sort of society that have created for ourselves?

If I were to identify the one thing that Kerala needs to prioritize it would be sound parenting. We say, ‘character is destiny’. Even more truly, parenting is destiny. But this is completely neglected. Who trains men and women for this, the most significant of all tasks? As per the prevailing outlook, it suffices if parents keep their children indulged, even if they have to starve themselves for it. Affan’s parents were a victim of this perverse and pervasive notion even before they became his victims.