Freedom: Express - Educate – Empower

It was the month of October in the year 2006. I landed in one of the most backward villages of Karnataka for my mission experience as a novice. The place was yet to feel the air of modernity. The dehumanizing caste practices were prevalent in the village, in various forms like child and bonded labour, unjust wages, women sexual harassments etc. During my month long stay in the village I happened to come across a boy, name Basava. He was about 8 years old working as a bonded labourer, having morning 5 till night 9 as his working hours in the house of a landlord.
At he end of my village stay, as I was walking back to the centre, the boy came running to me. With tears in his eyes, he asked, “Sir! I too want to be like others, I too want to study.  Will you help me? It was much later (that) I realized that Basava was crying for Freedom.

A fish enjoys being in the water and the bird expresses itself as it fly’s high. If that’s a freedom for them, what’s then is the freedom for you and me- human persons?

Let us take a relook at the words of Basava.

a  “I too want to be like others”:  Basava was slowly realizing that he was bound socially, economically and politically. He had sensed that being a bonded labourer, he had no liberty to exercise his free will or to make a free choice. He was asking, that let he be allowed to EXPRESS himself.

      “I too want to study”:  Though a small boy may be Basava knew that it is the EDUCATION that ultimately liberates. I would like to go a step further than mere literacy when I speak of education. Education happens at every moment of our life. In the school of life the authentic education, takes place when we start living every moment.  Literacy, definitely adds to education.

c)      “Can you help me?”  : I believe this is a direct address to you and me, who have chosen to be religious. It’s a call or a challenge to EMPOWER. But the fact is that, to empower the other, first and foremost I need to be empowered and liberated first. In this regard one important lesson that I would like to take from the life of Mahatma Gandhi. Reading his autobiography, we realize, whenever there was a thought of empowering others in him, he would firstly check the purity of his intention and secondly he would patiently study the situation, by living in that reality. Therefore ‘To Empower’ is a call to us religious to open our closed doors and move out to the people, to get in touch with the reality around.

Conclusion:

Only a free person can help others to be free. Thus before we think of teaching others to Express, to set them free, we need to learn the art of Expression – true and deep. To educate the other, we need to be attentive students in the school of life, reading the signs of the time. And finally in empowering the others, we too are empowered, for we are relational beings.

May Basava, who represents those millions who suffer, awaken us to be free and to set others free.