When Conscience Bites

Mark Twain said, ‘Good friends, good books and a sleepy conscience – this is the ideal life.’ I thought that ‘sleepy conscience’ meant a conscience which is not responding to reality, but I was wrong. Dead wrong!

Google tells me that, “sleepy conscience” is ‘a state of being calm and at peace because you are living in alignment with your values and have no guilt or worry.’ Oh, how I misunderstood words!

We think opposites. I do. Good vs bad, white vs black, light vs dark. What is the opposite of ‘sleepy conscience?’ The answer is, ‘Awake conscience – having a strong moral compass that is alert and responsive to wrongdoing.’

This picture was taken at Khar Station in Mumbai. We see a large crowd of young persons, they are all waiting for a Contractor, like a building contractor. There were about a thousand people. Some get to work for the day, others return home for lunch.

What kind of life is our society providing for them? Does it shock our Awake Conscience? Perhaps yes, it does. The trouble is that we do not convert it into action; it stays at awareness and empathy level without remedial action. We stay like a car with its petrol tank full, but one which is abandoned by its owner.

Three hundred feet away from Khar Station, these two boys were flying a kite, oblivious of the pain of people around them. Like us? Not really. We act like Emu. The kids are too young to understand what life has dealt with for the casual workers at Khar Station.

Three people were sitting at the bus stop. The bench is used by old men to sit after a long morning walk. Lost in their thoughts. November in Thane brought cool air and light breeze in the morning. What do people in their seventies think in the morning?

Maybe of their ‘relevance,’ like those young men standing at the Khar Station. Their relevance and station in life!

Talking of morning walk, there is something magical about it. I woke up early and Sulabha, my wife, kept this tiny electric lamp which we use for Diwali celebrations on the dining table. It created a good pic of light and shade. I clicked.

Sun rises late in November. Or I came out early. I saw colors on the east side. This is the predawn, I had never seen these colors in sky at Thane. Discovery!

My wife took me to the Siddhivinayak Ganapati Mandir at Prabhadevi. I am not the temple going type. My eyes kept looking for interesting spots. So many Ganapati idols at one place make an interesting sight.

From Prabhadevi we travelled to Gateway of India to take the 30 min boat ride. We were the last to board the boat, so we did not get a good seat. Travellers were looking out at the sea and the seagulls. From a moving boat.

Three things were moving simultaneously – Sea, the boat and the seagulls. Nah, how can we miss the fourth, the mind, which is deeper than the sea and flies faster than the seagulls? What were these passengers thinking or feeling? Each in his own world!

Seagulls make the boat ride lively. Here is one which came close to us and flew away.

I attended the first Udayan Bhattacharya Memorial Lecture. Sunil Shanbag, the well-known actor, director, spoke for about an hour and held the audience spell bound.

Here is a story he shared which left me speechless. Rabindranath Tagore’s 1912 play, “Dak Ghar” (The Post Office), has a profound and poignant connection to Poland, specifically the Warsaw Ghetto during the Holocaust.

In 1942, the Polish-Jewish doctor, educator, and writer Janusz Korczak (also known as Henryk Goldszmit) directed an adaptation of the play with the children in his Jewish orphanage, just weeks before they were all deported to the Treblinka extermination camp. Korczak, who refused sanctuary offers to stay with his children, chose the play for its universal message of hope, liberation, and finding peace in the face of imminent death.

Korczak hoped the play would help the children, who were confined and facing inevitable death, to accept their fate with dignity and hope, reframing their suffering through the lens of imagination and spiritual liberation.

The performance became a powerful symbol of spiritual resistance and the preservation of human dignity in the face of Nazi brutality. Only one girl, Rebecca, who played the character Sudha, survived the Holocaust.

The play’s message of universal humanism resonated widely during World War II, with over a hundred performances in various concentration camps, and a French translation was even read on the radio the night before Paris fell to the Nazis.

I am too moved to comment on this event. Even Rabindranath Tagore would not have imagined what his play ‘Dak Ghar’ was going to be used for.

I will conclude with this Korczak quote: ‘I exist not to be loved and admired, but to love and act. It is not the duty of those around me to love me. Rather, it is my duty to be concerned about the world, about man.’

Vivek S Patwardhan

“What you leave behind is not what is engraved in stone monuments, but what is woven into the lives of others.” All matter copyrighted.