• Prema Jayakumar

‘Wish you a Merry Christmas and a Happy New Year.’  The conventional greetings that trip over your tongue are a little difficult this year.

It is difficult to wish each other happiness and celebrate a festival or be optimistic about the beginning of a new year with the state of the world as it is.  The number of armed conflicts going on all over is mind-boggling.  It becomes more difficult if you, like John Donne, believe that ‘Any man’s death diminishes me.  I am involved in mankind.’

And yet, one cannot do without celebrations, if only as reminders to ourselves that there are days when you think of other things, when you feel happy about some gifts that you have been granted.  And surely the Christmas season is one of them.  While it is impossible, unless you are very naïve, to believe in ‘Peace on earth and goodwill to mankind ‘as something you can take for granted, at least let us remind ourselves of the fact that there is such an ideal and till some time ago we had believed it a possible achievement.

Conflict becomes more and more destructive as the weapons become more and more powerful.  When it is so easy to destroy whole areas by pressing a button, and the button is right under your finger it is probably difficult to refrain from doing so.  Especially if in your mind the enemy deserves annihilation.  Enemies seem to be very easy to find since the definition of ‘enemy’ now is more and more ‘anyone who opposes me’.

World opinion does not appear to count for much, informed as it is by the interests of the country expressing the opinion.  Abstract morality does not exist.  You don’t have the old barriers that tell you that you do not go beyond a certain level of destruction.  For all the observances and the swearings, religion does not seem to act as a deterrent of foul deeds.  After all, all religions speak of morality, even when waging a war that they deem righteous.  And yet, it is in the name of religion and righteousness that so many wars are fought.  Or to take possession of a piece of land.  There is an old saying in Malayalam that says that the goddess earth laughs when people fight over land because all of the contestants will die and the land will be left there.

It is difficult to mindlessly go through the motions of celebration, to do all the things you used to do to celebrate when you read of death and destruction every day, you hear of death and destruction throughout the day.  Numbers of the dead have ceased to have any meaning; we have become so used to large numbers.  When the death of small children means nothing to the world, it becomes the death of innocence in all of us as well.

Perhaps what we should pray for, hope for, this season, is an awakening of conscience in all men and women, so that we work for peace everywhere as much as we can, so that we try to lessen the sufferings of all people everywhere, starting with our own neighbourhood.  A resolution not to get involved in petty disputes, a sincere attempt to tolerate if not love our neighbours in our individual lives, might not come amiss.  Where we cannot change the course of the world, perhaps we can change the course of our lives and the lives of those who live around us.

We started with John Donne.  Let us end with Emily Dickinson and say ‘I dwell in possibility.’  The possibility of a world where there is not much conflict, where people do not spend all their time aiming weapons at each other, where children do not die in hospitals and schools, where guns do not suddenly blaze in a suburban school, where people do not kill each other in the name of colour, race or religion.  Let us dwell on the possibility of peace, of brotherhood, of living together amicably.  Let this Christmas and New year bring us news of at least a few beginnings of these. Of the old promise of the lion lying with the lamb, of swords being beaten into ploughshares.  Let the memory of the arrival of the Wonderful Counsellor, the Prince of Peace, at least bring the idea of peace into the minds of those with power.