Power in Writing

Re: # 3
Phoolan didn`t fight for justice or any noble cause. She was brutalized by men and a time came when she gave it back to them. She led an extraordinary life but nothing along the lines you talk about.

Re: # 3
Phoolam didn`t fight for justice or any noble cause. She was brutalized by men and a time came when she gave it back to them. She led an extraordinary life but nothing along the lines you talk about.

Re: # 2

okaab

As I understand it, Phoolan Devi was a reverential matriarchal freedom fighter in a patriarchal society. Men suffocated her with injustice yet she struggled to vindicate a noble cause.

Re: # 1
``Jinnah, Gandhi, Iqbal, Phoolan Devi and Martin Luther King``
Phoolan`s in strange company! What made you club her with the freedon fighters?

Steven, good article. I like the way you `feel` King and not get mesmerized.

Steven Guevara

When I first read ``I have a dream`` shivers ran through my spine. Seldom have I felt so empowered in my life.

Especially in South Asia, we are all bruised by the storms of persecution and staggered by the thunder of brutality: be that of the millitary, the bearded brigade, the ``tulleh`` or the intelligence services.

Articles such as yours should electrify us to climb from the desolate feudal hills of caste, ``baradari`` and class structures climbing atop an Alpine sunlit surrounding of justice. Now is the time for all the Desi youth to stick their necks out and not be mired in the quicksand of nationalism.

We all stand in the symbolic shadows of great icons like Jinnah, Gandhi, Iqbal, Phoolan Devi and Martin Luther King. Their momentous efforts descend as a beacon light of hope to millions of unemancipated sufferers in Mazar-e-Sharif, Assam or Gujarat.

Everywhere South Asians are seared in the burning fire of injustice. A daybreak to end this long night of mental captivity has not yet dawned. Martin Luther would be turning in his grave at the way we as humans rape, shackle, imprison and ensalve ourselves.

We are crippled by the manacles of segregation and the chains of discrimination from the glaciers of Siachin to the Sinhalese/Tamil war-torn SriLanka. Millions exist in mudhuts of poverty amidst a vast ocean of neo-con ``brown-sahebs`` awash with material prosperity. We are languishing at the periphery of society finding ourselves

Not exalted but exiled.

Not emancipated but endangered.

Female genital mutilation, child labour, honour killings irrepressibly deny our inalienable rights of life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness. SAARC and other fora have sought to adress some of these malignant issues yet they remain paper tiger with suited cronies who have defaulted on their dire diplomacy. Or as Martin Luther would put it ``there are insufficient funds in the great vaults of opportunity``.

We are citizens of a globe garbadged by environmental damage, scarred by HIV, hungered by malnutrition having harboured a most hallowed spot. The fiercest urgency is to rectify this. It is no time to engage in the luxury of cooling off in our air-conditioned ivory towers of Mumbai, Pak Towers of Karachi or edifices in Dhaka, nor to take the tranquilizing drug of ``nasha`` inducing gradualism.

It would be fatal for the Sub-continent to overlook the urgency of the moment. This sweltering summer of our people`s legitimate disquiet will only deafen if there is an invigorating autumn of freedom.

This is not a case of my blowing off eutopian steam.

Whoever thinks it is merits a rude awakening. The whirlwinds in Kashmir needlessly shake the foundations of our Sub-Continent. Why not hold a referendum there ? Let the people decide. Nothing is more soothing than the warm threshold of public approval. Let us not quench our thirst for freedom by violating rights in Sri Nagr, or anywhere else.

Chowk provides a forum for a creative protest: this must NEVER, especially not on CHOWK,

degenerate into Indo-Pak mud-slinging. A favourite past-time of many registered users herein.

The marvelous new militancy of Indo-Pak agitation has been witnessed a million times and more on this forum. Guys let us grow up. Move on. Not engulf ourselves in petty politics. 56 years are ENOUGH.

Indian, Pakistani, Bangladeshi, Nepali, Bhutani, Sri Lankan destinies are inter-twined.
Our unearned suffering is redemptive. This redemption can be sought by reading deep into the sagacity of Dr King.

Witness Martin Luther King at his greatest:

``We will not be satisfied until justice rolls down like waters and righteousness like a mighty stream. Let us not wallow in the valley of despair. A sweltering heat of injustice and oppression, will be transformed into an oasis of freedom and justice. I have a dream that my four children will one day live in a nation where they will not be judged by the color of their skin but by the content of their character.

``I have a dream that one day every valley shall be exalted, every hill and mountain shall be made low, the rough places will be made plain. With this faith we will be able to hew out of the mountain of despair a stone of hope. With this faith we will be able to transform the jangling discords of our nation into a beautiful symphony of brotherhood.

So let freedom ring from the prodigious hilltops. Let freedom ring from the mighty mountains. Let freedom ring from the heightening Alleghenies. Let freedom ring from the snowcapped Rockies. Let freedom ring from the curvaceous peaks.

When we let freedom ring, when we let it ring from every village and every hamlet, from every state and every city, we will be able to speed up that day when all of God`s children, black men and white men, Jews and Gentiles, Protestants and Catholics, will be able to join hands and sing in the words ``Free at last! free at last! thank God Almighty, we are free at last!``