Ambedkar: The Romantics

You are our Mooknayak, the leader of us who were made dumb by the caste–nation. You fought for us only with words when everything else was snatched away from us. On your birthday today, I shut my ears and eyes because they could be enchanted by the foolish creations the world around me is making for a cheap adrenaline rush. I am enriching you in words.

—

PEOPLE are increasingly becoming less and less interested in words. They are behind events, and visuals which provide them instant adrenaline rush. But in truth, when were people in this country interested in words? Words which 'speak' never fail to communicate, words which do not need disguise, words which inspire us to think, words which expose our own fear and vulnerabilities, and words which make us conscious of our own responsibilities and pain followed by it.

When I shared a poem about PhD scholar Rohith Vemula on his death anniversary, it attracted many more 'likes' and much more attention on social media than when I shared the same poem on other days. We have turned out to be more attentive to events, visuals, and whatever is appeasing to our eyes and soothing to our ears.

We are increasingly forgetting that we have to train our mind, and cultivate it in order to maintain dignity in life and never let ourselves fall in our own eyes. It is a symptom of our failure of making our brain critically conscious about our dreams as well.

People today are more attentive to your pictures, your images or your visuals rather than words painstakingly written by you, about you; words being the only bridge that could lead us to you. Your picture would fetch thousands of 'likes' on social media, whereas your words, or words about you, would get less attention. We have started to seek gratification from you, rather than courage to face our own fear and vulnerabilities as a society.

My father died in August 2022. You must know that when you arrived in Nagpur in October 1956 for the proclamation of the most peaceful revolution on Earth, my father was also there in the crowd as a three years-old boy. My grandfather had put my father next to his neck, with his legs hanging from my grandfather's chest and his hands probably holding his father's head. They walked a few kilometres from home to what is now called Dikshabhoomi.