Prema Jayakumar

‘And the peace of God, which transcends all understanding, will guard your hearts and your minds.’ So we pray.
As ever, come Christmas time, followed by the birth of the New Year, there is only one thing to wish for once you are an adult: Peace on earth and goodwill to mankind.
This year too we shall wish each other the same wish, but I wonder how much conviction there will be in the wish. There is so much strife all over the world, the Holy Land itself is in the grip of a brutal war, there are wars and confrontations all over the earth. How does one say with sincerity, whole-heartedly, that there will be peace on earth?
What is Christmas? It is tenderness for the past, courage for the present, hope for the future. That was Agnes M. Pahro, writer and artist.
It looks as though this Christmas, we shall have to settle for the second of the wishes and hope that the other two will come back in time.
Nations fight over small patches of land. It is said that the Goddess Earth laughs when there are small boundary disputes between neighbours. When the poles of the fence are moved this way and that with each year’s renewal of the fencing. The people who do these things are likely to vanish from the earth before the poles rot. I wonder if she can laugh when nations fight and spill blood over patches of land, some fertile, some completely inhospitable.
Is it too much to hope that we can make a world where ‘nation shall not lift up sword against nation,’ a world where swords are turned into ploughshares? After all, no one except a madman would want to live in constant strife, fighting, giving and receiving wounds, killing people and having your own people killed. And yet, that is what we see all over the world. Even within countries where boundaries are not in question, but one set of people are castigated as the ‘others’ and viewed with suspicion. It is suspicion that breeds violence, because you want to pre-empt a perceived attack from the ‘other’. And yet it is more natural to like than to dislike. Children smile at anyone who smiles at them. They learn to be wary only much later. Nelson Mandela, even after years of incarceration, racial abuse and living with this perceived ‘otherness’, had the faith to say, ‘No one is born hating another person because of the colour of his skin, or his background, or his religion. People must learn to hate, and if they can learn to hate, they can be taught to love, for love comes more naturally to the human heart than its opposite.’ Surely, we who have not faced so much, can teach ourselves to believe in that.
Why are we incapable of living in peace with our neighbours, with the people of another religion, another ethnicity, another race? Is it because peace is difficult, because as Bernard Shaw said men are bunglers in the art of peace? Or is it that leaders want to be known for the wars they won than the peaces they negotiated? Or do conglomerates that mint money from armaments (it is said that the most lucrative businesses are that of weaponry and cosmetics!) wish for trouble spots to sell their ware? Or because peace needs working at and there is no special glory about that hard grind?
What else can we hope for, except that each of us tries to cleanse our minds and hearts of the poison of suspicion, of dislike, of dismissal of the ‘others’ and learn to live with each other in amity if not active friendship, at the very minimum, with tolerance towards people different from our own selves? Let us hope so. Perhaps if enough of us do so, the world will change, slowly, but surely.
If each of us could repeat sincerely Satish Kumar’s adaptation of the prayer from the Upanishads:
Lead me from death to life, from falsehood to truth.
Lead me from despair to hope, from fear to trust.
Lead me from hate to love, from war to peace.
Let peace fill our heart, our world, our universe.