Bob’s Banter

By Robert Clements

Diwali, Truth and Light..!
Last night, I watched the diyas outside homes, their little flames pushing back the darkness. I wondered whether we could persuade one of those diyas to stand for election. “What is your manifesto?” we would ask.
“To remove darkness,” it would reply.
“And after you win?”
“I shall continue removing darkness.”
I can imagine a senior party man taking it aside. “A word of advice,” he would say. “Never promise to remove all the darkness. What will you campaign against next time?”
The diya would make a dreadful politician. You could see what it was doing.
I imagine its first press conference would be quite short. “Is there darkness in your constituency?” a reporter would ask.
“Yes,” the diya would say.
“Where?”
“Just beyond the light. Come, I’ll show you.” An aide would rush forward to explain that the honourable lamp had been quoted out of context. What it meant was that the constituency had achieved unprecedented levels of brightness. Any resident who felt otherwise was advised to look at the figures. Preferably in daylight.
Of course, it is easy to laugh at a government that wants us to believe its figures instead of our own eyes. We do much the same thing in our family groups. “Have you checked whether this message is true?” you ask a man who has just forwarded a video accusing his neighbours of insulting a festival. “Why?” he asks. “It’s already been shared a thousand times!” Well, there you are. A thousand people have passed the parcel and everybody is confident somebody else looked inside.
Suppose his niece does look inside and discovers that the video was filmed three years ago in another country. What happens then? “Uncle, shall I put the correction on the group?” she asks. “No need,” says Uncle. “We’ve had enough unpleasantness for one evening.” He is very particular about keeping the peace once the lie has done its work. And tomorrow, when the neighbour he helped malign asks how his family enjoyed Diwali, he will smile, say, “Very much,” and leave his phone where it is. I recognise Uncle. I can spend half an hour checking whether a shopkeeper has overcharged me by fifty rupees. Give me a story that makes somebody I dislike look foolish and I can dispense with verification altogether. I might even add “Please share widely,” which is a bold instruction from a man who has yet to read past the first paragraph. Of course, should somebody circulate a lie about me, I immediately develop very high standards for journalism.
Diwali celebrates the victory of light over darkness. I wonder how often we give the light permission to go where it pleases. We are delighted when it shows up a lie told by the other side.
Let it expose one told by our own side and suddenly we have questions about who lit the lamp, who supplied the oil and what the lamp was doing in that particular lane at that hour.
And so, this Diwali, my prayer for those who govern us is that some of the devotion they bring to religious ceremonies will accompany them to work the next morning. There, a widow may be waiting to ask why her pension has stopped. “Do you know anyone in the department?” a helpful man in the queue asks her. “No,” she says. “Does anyone in the department know about my pension?” It is a perfectly sensible question, which may explain why nobody has been able to answer it.
Let there be just laws, fairly applied. Let the poor be heard before an election as readily as they are sought out during one. And let a citizen’s name, clothes or prayers tell an official as much about that citizen’s rights as the colour of an umbrella. If a man comes to a police station because someone has threatened him, surely the first question is, “Who threatened you?” A country begins to lose its way when the first question becomes, “Which community did you say you belong to?”
I would also like to hear a minister say, “We made a mistake.” I promise I will let him finish. Most of us would. We have made enough mistakes of our own to appreciate how much courage that sentence takes. What tries our patience is hearing that the mistake was a historic success, that its benefits will become clear in due course, and that a committee has been appointed to find out why nobody can see them.
My imaginary diya, meanwhile, would have a question for me. “You want the minister to admit his mistake. Have you corrected that message you sent yesterday?” I would probably say I had been very busy writing about truth.
The diya would wait. There is something awkward about being left alone with a lamp. It gives you plenty of light to see what you are doing and absolutely no help in explaining it away.
“Asato ma sad gamaya,” says the ancient prayer. Lead us from untruth to truth. “Tamaso ma jyotir gamaya.” Lead us from darkness to light. “Mrityor ma amritam gamaya.” Lead us from death to immortality. May those words travel from our doorsteps to the rooms where laws are made and decisions taken. May they also reach us the next time we are about to pass on a lie simply because we like what it says. It is easy to ask to be led into the light. I suspect the prayer begins to do its work when the light falls on something we were hoping to keep in the dark.
Happy Diwali, my friends. And if that little diya does stand for election, it has my vote. Though I rather hope it asks what I’m doing with my own lamp first..!
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